Part 19

With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one mentioned; among them were Health and Money. I presume that people had pretty much the same complaints as now, but no one talked about them. We used to be told of a lady who died in agony because she insisted on telling the doctor that the pain was in her chest whereas it really was in the unmentionable organ of digestion. That martyr to propriety has no imitators in the present day. Every one has a disease and a doctor; and young people of both sexes are ready on the slightest acquaintance to describe symptoms and compare experiences. "Ice!" exclaimed a pretty girl at dessert, "good gracious, no! so bad for indy"--and her companion, who had not travelled with the times, learned with amazement that "indy" was the pet name for indigestion. "How bitterly cold!" said a plump matron at an open-air luncheon; "just the thing to give one appendicitis." "Oh!" said her neighbour, surveying the company, "we are quite safe there. I shouldn't think we had an appendix between us."

Then, again, as to money. In the "Sacred Circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" I never heard the slightest reference to income. Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its odour was not displeasing. But it was not a subject for conversation. People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale us with statistics of profit and loss. To-day every one seems to be, if I may use the favourite colloquialism, "on the make"; and the sincerity of the devotion with which people worship money pervades their whole conversation and colours their whole view of life. "Scions of aristocracy," to use the good old phrase of Pennialinus, will produce samples of tea or floor-cloth from their pockets, and sue quite winningly for custom. A speculative bottle of extraordinarily cheap peach-brandy will arrive with the compliments of Lord Tom Noddy, who has just gone into the wine trade, and Lord Magnus Charters will tell you that, if you are going to put in the electric light, his firm has got some really good fittings which he can let you have on specially easy terms.

But, if in old days Health and Money were subjects eschewed in polite conversation, even more rigid was the avoidance of "risky" topics. To-day no scandal is too gross, no gossip too prurient. Respectable mothers chatter quite freely about that "nest of spicery" over which Sir Gorell Barnes presides, and canvass abominations with a self-possession worthy of Gibbon or Zola. In fact, as regards our topics of conversation, we seem to have reached the condition in which the Paris correspondent of the _Daily Telegraph_ found himself when Mr. Matthew Arnold (in "Friendship's Garland") spoke to him of Delicacy. "He seemed inexplicably struck by this word _delicacy_, which he kept repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he; 'delicacy, surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh enthusiastic youth, before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper----.' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' said I, laying my hand on his shoulder, 'you are unmanned.'" A similar emotion would probably be caused by any one so old-fashioned as to protest that any conceivable topic was ill-adapted for discussion in general society.

An extreme decorum of phrase accompanied this salutary restriction of topics. To a boisterous youth who, just setting out for a choral festival in a country church, said that he always thought a musical service very jolly, an old Whig lady said in a tone of dignified amendment, "I trust, dear Mr. F----, that we shall derive not only pleasure but profit from the solemnity of this afternoon."

Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and it has so impartially pervaded all departments of life that one may plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon.

Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action.

Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington, and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and ride over them when they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor, classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that "the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team.

I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it. Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."

Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days. In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping a _salon_, giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings, and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the "three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, and confusion."

When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone--that stiffest of social conservatives--exclaimed, "Mrs. W----, forsooth! I have known much greater ladies than Mrs. W---- quite content to look down through the ventilator."

XLV

TOWN _V._ COUNTRY

I said at the outset that I am a Whig _pur sang_; and the historic Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion, the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments."

This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home. In those days the tradition of Duty required people who had several country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof--sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home.

People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of the Hall or the Manor.

For people who had a country house the interests of life were very much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"

The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor. Christmas decorations were an occasion of much innocent merriment, and a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be--

"Unselfish--looking not to see Proofs of their own dexterity; But quite contented that 'I' should Forgotten be in brotherhood."

Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman is _sur ses terres_," said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system--and a very comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating incumbent, "but I must insist on my family pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."

A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.

Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across the village green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time.

They knew every one in the village--old and young; played with the babies, taught the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and impotent, read by the sick-beds, and brought flowers for the coffin. Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the young-ladies-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted' that. 'E's nimble, ain't 'e?" And I well remember an ancient stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the service of one family.

Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up, between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English peasant is too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments were often bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is understanding's no worse than it always were," was a ploughman's way of saying that the old squire was in full possession of his faculties. "We call 'im ''Is Lordship,' because 'e's so old and so cunning," was another's description of a famous pony. "Ah, I know you're but a poor creature at the best!" was the recognized way of complimenting a lady on what she considered her bewitching and romantic delicacy.

But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion, and was full of enquiries about his lordship and her ladyship, and Miss Pinkerton the governess, and whether Mr. Wheeler was still coachman, and who lived now at the entrance-lodge. Whether the sons got commissions, or took ranches, or become curates in slums, or contested remote constituencies, some grinning face was sure to emerge from the crowd with, "You know me, sir? Bill Juffs, as used to go bird's-nesting with you;" or, "You remember my old dad, my lord? He used to shoe your black pony."

When the eldest son came of age, his condescension in taking this step was hailed with genuine enthusiasm. When he came into his kingdom, there might be some grumbling if he went in for small economies, or altered old practices, or was a "hard man" on the Bench or at the Board of Guardians; but, if he went on in the good-natured old ways, the traditional loyalty was unabated.

Lord Shaftesbury wrote thus about the birth of his eldest son's eldest son: "My little village is all agog with the birth of a son and heir in the very midst of them, the first, it is believed, since 1600, when the first Lord Shaftesbury was born. The christening yesterday was an ovation. Every cottage had flags and flowers. We had three triumphal arches; and all the people were exulting. 'He is one of us.' 'He is a fellow-villager.' 'We have now got a lord of our own.' This is really gratifying. I did not think that there remained so much of the old respect and affection between peasant and proprietor, landlord and tenant."

Whether the kind of relation thus described has utterly perished I do not know; but certainly it has very greatly diminished, and the cause of the diminution is that people live less and less in their country houses, and more and more in London. For those who are compelled by odious necessity to sell or let their hereditary homes one has nothing but compassion; in itself a severe trial, it is made still sharper to well-conditioned people by the sense that the change is at least as painful to the poor as to themselves. But for those who, having both a country and a London house, deliberately concentrate themselves on the town, forsake the country, and abjure the duties which are inseparable from their birthright, one can only feel Charles Lamb's "imperfect sympathy." The causes which induce this dereliction and its results on society and on the country may be discussed in another chapter.

XLVI

HOME

I was speaking just now of the growing tendency to desert the country in favour of London. I said that it was difficult to feel sympathy with people who voluntarily abandon Home, and all the duties and pleasures which Home implies, in favour of Lennox Gardens or Portman Square; but that one felt a lively compassion for those who make the exchange under the pressure of--

"Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear."

Here, again, is another social change. In old days, when people wished to economize, it was London that they deserted. They sold the "family mansion" in Portland Place or Eaton Square; and, if they revisited the glimpses of the social moon, they took a furnished house for six weeks in the summer: the rest of the year they spent in the country. This plan was a manifold saving. There was no rent to pay, and only very small rates, for every one knows that country houses were shamefully under-assessed. Carriages did not require repainting every season, and no new clothes were wanted. "What can it matter what we wear here, where every one knows who we are?" The products of the park, the home farm, the hothouses, and the kitchen-garden kept the family supplied with food. A brother magnate staying at Beaudesert with the famous Lord Anglesey waxed enthusiastic over the mutton, and said, "Excuse my asking you a plain question, but how much does this excellent mutton cost you?" "Cost me?" screamed the hero. "Good Gad, it costs me nothing! It's my own," and he was beyond measure astonished when his statistical guest proved that "his own" cost him about a guinea per pound. In another great house, conducted on strictly economical lines, it was said that the very numerous family were reared exclusively on rabbits and garden-stuff, and that their enfeebled constitutions and dismal appearance in later life were due to this ascetic regimen.

People were always hospitable in the country, but rural entertaining was not a very costly business. The "three square meals and a snack," which represent the minimum requirement of the present day, are a huge development of the system which prevailed in my youth. Breakfast had already grown from the tea and coffee, and rolls and eggs, which Macaulay tells us were deemed sufficient at Holland House, to an affair of covered dishes. Luncheon-parties were sometimes given--terrible ceremonies which lasted from two to four; but the ordinary luncheon of the family was really a snack from the servants' joint or the children's rice-pudding; and five o'clock tea was actually not invented. To remember, as I do, the foundress of that divine refreshment seems like having known Stephenson or Jenner.

Dinner was substantial enough in all conscience, and the wine nearly as heavy as the food. Imagine quenching one's thirst with sherry in the dog days! Yet so we did, till about half-way through dinner, and then, on great occasions, a dark-coloured rill of champagne began to trickle into the saucer-shaped glasses. At the epoch of cheese, port made its appearance in company with home-brewed beer; and, as soon as the ladies and the schoolboys departed, the men applied themselves, with much seriousness of purpose, to the consumption of claret which was really vinous.

In this kind of hospitality there was no great expense. People made very little difference between their way of living when they were alone and their way of living when they had company. A visitor who wished to make himself agreeable sometimes brought down a basket of fish or a barrel of oysters from London; and, if one had no deer of one's own, the arrival of a haunch from a neighbour's or kinsman's park was the signal for a gathering of local gastronomers.

And in matters other than meals life went on very much the same whether you had friends staying with you or whether you were alone. Your guests drove and rode, and walked and shot, according to their tastes and the season of the year. They were carried off, more or less willingly, to see the sights of the neighbourhood--ruined castles, restored cathedrals, famous views. In summer there might be a picnic or a croquet-party; in winter a lawn-meet or a ball. But all these entertainments were of the most homely and inexpensive character. There was very little outlay, no fuss, and no display. People, who were compelled by stress of financial weather to put into their country houses and remain there till the storm was over, contrived to economize and yet be comfortable. They simply lived their ordinary lives until things righted themselves, and very likely did not attempt London again until they were bringing out another daughter, or had to make a home for a son in the Guards.