Part 21

But alas! they are "gone down to Hades, even many stalwart sons of heroes,"--with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake--men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.

They are gone, and we are left--an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.

In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"--and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about putting the Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.

We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.

The decay of prejudice in the sphere of politics is even more remarkable than in that of religion. In old days, political agreement was a strong and a constraining bond. When people saw a clear right and wrong in politics, they governed their private as well as their public life accordingly. People who held the same political beliefs lived and died together. In society and hospitality, in work and recreation, in journalism and literature--even in such seemingly indifferent matters as art and the drama--they were closely and permanently associated.

Eton was supposed to cherish a romantic affection for the Stuarts, and therefore to be a fit training place for sucking Tories; Harrow had always been Hanoverian, and therefore attracted little Whigs to its Hill. Oxford, with its Caroline theology and Jacobite tradition, was the Tory university; Cambridge was the nursing-mother of Whigs, until Edinburgh, under the influence of Jeffrey and Brougham, tore her babes from her breast. In society you must choose between the Duchess of Devonshire and the Duchess of Gordon, or, in a later generation, between Lady Holland and Lady Jersey. In clubland the width of St. James's Street marked a dividing line of abysmal depth; and to this day "Grillon's" remains the memorial of an attempt, then unique, to bring politicians of opposite sides together in social intercourse. On the one side stood Scott--where Burke had stood before him--the Guardian Angel of Monarchy and Aristocracy: on the other were Shelley and Byron, and (till they turned their coats) the emancipated singers of Freedom and Humanity. The two political parties had even their favourite actors, and the Tories swore by Kemble while the Whigs roared for Kean.

Then, as now, the Tories were a wealthy, powerful, and highly-organized confederacy. The Whigs were notoriously a family party. From John, Lord Gower, who died in 1754, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, descend all the Gowers, Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells who walk on the face of the earth. It is a goodly company. Well might Thackeray exclaim, "I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"

Lord Beaconsfield described in "Coningsby" how the Radical manufacturer, sending his boy to Eton, charged him to form no intimacies with his father's hereditary foes. This may have been a flight of fancy; but certainly, when a lad was going to Oxford or Cambridge, his parents and family friends would warn him against entering into friendships with the other side. The University Clubs which he joined and the votes which he gave at the Union were watched with anxious care. He was early initiated into the political society to which his father belonged. Extraneous intimacies were regarded with the most suspicious anxiety. Mothers did all they knew to make their darlings acquainted with daughters of families whose political faith was pure, and I have myself learned, by not remote tradition, the indignant horror which pervaded a great Whig family when the heir-presumptive to its honours married the daughter of a Tory Lord Chamberlain. "That girl will ruin the politics of the family and undo the work of two hundred years" was the prophecy; and I have seen it fulfilled.

L

CULTURE

One of the social changes which most impresses me is the decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. My own view of the subject is probably tinged by the fact that I was born a Whig and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning, and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture, and the Tories were just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings," and one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not now thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope and Sir Charles Bunbury, or of professed blue-stockings, such as Barbarina Lady Dacre and Georgiana Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their class and had profited by it.

Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, it was possible to learn much or to learn nothing, but it was not possible to learn superficially. And one saw the same in afterlife. What people professed to know they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was honestly confessed. For example, every one knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been to a University but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings and corrupt texts and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle in "Nicholas Nickleby," who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man" or whether it was merely his widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the plays with a wide and generous intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics.

Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; and Wordsworth was tolerated. Every one knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.

Then, again, all educated people knew history in a broad and comprehensive way. They did not concern themselves about ethnological theories, influences of race and climate and geography, streams of tendency, and the operation of unseen laws; but they knew all about the great people and the great events of time. They were conversant with all that was concrete and ascertainable; and they took sides as eagerly and as definitely in the strifes of Yorkist and Lancastrian, Protestant and Papist, Roundhead and Cavalier, as in the controversies over the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Then, again, all educated people knew the laws of architecture and of painting; and, though it must be confessed that in these respects their views were not very original, still they were founded on first-hand knowledge of famous models, and, though conventional, were never ignorant.

But it will be said that all this represents no very overwhelming mass of culture, and that, if these were all the accomplishments which the last generation had to boast of, their successors have no reason to dread comparison.

Well, I expressly said that I was not describing learned or even exceptionally well-read people, but merely the general level of educated society; and that level is, I am persuaded, infinitely lower than it was in former generations. Of course there are instances to the contrary which perplex and disturb the public judgment, and give rise to the delusion that this is a learned age. Thus we have in society and politics such scholars as Lord Milner and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Herbert Paul; but then there have always been some scholars in public life, so there is nothing remarkable in the persistence of the type; whereas, on the other hand, the system of smattering and top-dressing which pervades Universities and Public Schools produces an ever-increasing crop of gentlemen who, like Mr. Riley in "The Mill on the Floss," have brought away with them from Oxford or Cambridge a general sense of knowing Latin, though their comprehension of any particular Latin is not ready.

It is, I believe, generally admitted that we speak French less fluently and less idiomatically than our fathers. The "barbarous neglect" of Italian, which used to rouse Mr. Gladstone's indignation, is now complete; and an even superstitious respect for the German language is accompanied by a curious ignorance of German literature. I remember an excellent picture in _Punch_ which depicted that ideal representative of skin-deep culture--the Rev. Robert Elsmere--on his knees before the sceptical squire, saying, "Pray, pray, don't mention the name of another German writer, or I shall have to resign my living."

Then, again, as regards women; of whom, quite as much as of men, I was thinking when I described the culture of bygone society. Here and there we see startling instances of erudition which throw a reflected and undeserved glory upon the undistinguished average. Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.

The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. The results are not far to seek.

One lady boldly takes the field with an assault on Christianity, and her apparatus of belated criticism and second-hand learning sets all society agape. Another fills a novel with morbid pathology, slays the villain by heart-disease, or makes the heroine interesting with phthisis; and people, forgetting Mr. Casaubon and Clifford Gray, exclaim, "How marvellous! This is, indeed, original research." A third, a fourth, and a fifth devote themselves to the task of readjusting the relation of the sexes, and fill their passionate volumes with seduction and lubricity. And here, again, just because our mothers did not traffic in these wares, the undiscerning public thinks that it has discovered a new vein of real though unsavoury learning, and ladies say, "It is not exactly a pleasant book, but one cannot help admiring the power."

Now I submit that these abnormalities are no substitute for decent and reasonable culture. Pedantry is not learning; and a vast deal of specialism, "mugged-up," as boys say, at the British Museum and the London Library, may co-exist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to theorize about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity instead of the address at the end of a wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?"

We can all patter about the traces of Bacon's influence in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and ransack our family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when "Cymbeline" was put on the stage, society was startled to find that the title-rôle was not a woman's. A year or two ago some excellent scenes from Jane Austen's novels were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, and a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else.

I have known in these later years a judge who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress who did not know the name of Izaak Walton. But probably the most typical illustration of modern culture was the reply of a lady who had been enthusing over the Wagnerian Cycle, and, when I asked her to tell me quite honestly, as between old friends, if she really enjoyed it, replied, "Oh yes! I think one likes Wagner--_doesn't one_?"

LI

RELIGION

There once was an Evangelical lady who had a Latitudinarian daughter and a Ritualistic son. On Sunday morning, when they were forsaking the family pew and setting out for their respective places of objectionable worship, these graceless young people used to join hands and exclaim, "Look at us, dear mamma! Do we not exemplify what you are so fond of saying, 'Infidelity and superstition, those kindred evils, go hand in hand'?"

The combination thus flippantly stated is a conspicuous sign of the present times. The decay of religion and the increase of superstition are among the most noteworthy of the social changes which I have seen.

When I speak of the decay of religion, of course I must be understood to refer only to external observances. As to interior convictions, I have neither the will nor the power to investigate them. I deal only with the habits of religious practice, and in this respect the contrast between Then and Now is marked indeed.

In the first place, grace was then said before and after dinner. I do not know that the ceremony was very edifying, but it was traditional and respectable. Bishop Wilberforce, in his diary, tells of a greedy clergyman who, when asked to say grace at a dinner-party, used to vary the form according to the character of the wine-glasses which he saw before him on the table. If they were champagne-glasses, he used to begin the benediction with "Bountiful Jehovah"; but, if they were only claret-glasses, he said, "We are not worthy of the least of Thy mercies."

Charles Kingsley, who generally drew his social portraits from actual life, described the impressive eloquence of the Rev. Mr. O'Blareaway, who inaugurated an exceptionally good dinner by praying "that the daily bread of our less-favoured brethren might be mercifully vouchsafed to them."

There was a well-remembered squire in Hertfordshire whose love of his dinner was constantly at war with his pietistic traditions. He always had his glass of sherry poured out before he sat down to dinner, so that he might get it without a moment's delay. One night, in his generous eagerness, he upset the glass just as he dropped into his seat at the end of grace, and the formula ran on to an unexpected conclusion, thus: "For what we are going to receive the Lord make us truly thankful--D---- n!"

But, if the incongruities which attended grace before dinner were disturbing, still more so were the solemnities of the close. Grace after dinner always happened at the moment of loudest and most general conversation. For an hour and a half people had been stuffing as if their lives depended on it--"one feeding like forty." After a good deal of sherry, the champagne had made its tardy appearance, had performed its welcome rounds, and had in turn been succeeded by port and home-brewed beer. Out of the abundance of the mouth the heart speaketh, and every one was talking at once, and very loud. Perhaps the venue was laid in a fox-hunting country, and then the air was full of such voices as these: "Were you out with the squire to-day?" "Any sport?" "Yes, we'd rather a nice gallop." "Plenty of the animal about, I hope?" "Well, I don't know. I believe that new keeper at Boreham Wood is a vulpicide. I don't half like his looks." "What an infernal villain! A man who would shoot a fox would poison his own grandmother." "Sh! Sh!" "What's the matter?" "_For what we have received_," &c.

Or perhaps we are dining in London in the height of the season. Fox-hunting is not the theme, but the conversation is loud, animated, and discursive. A lyrical echo from the summer of 1866 is borne back upon my memory--

_Agreeable Rattle._

This news from abroad is alarming; You've seen the _Pall Mall_ of to-day! Oh! Ilma di Murska was charming To-night in the _Flauto_, they say.

Not a ghost of a chance for the Tories, In spite of Adullam and Lowe; By the bye, have you heard the queer stories Of Overend, Gurney and Co.?

_Lively Young Lady._ Do you know you've been talking at the top of your voice all the time grace was going on?

_Agreeable Rattle._ Not really? I'm awfully sorry. But our host mumbles so, I never can make out what he's saying.

_Lively Young Lady._ I can't imagine why people don't have grace after dessert. I know I'm much more thankful for strawberry ice than for saddle of mutton.

And so on and so forth. On the whole, I am not sure that the abolition of grace is a sign of moral degeneracy, but I note it as a social change which I have seen.

Another such change is the disuse of Family Players. In the days of my youth, morning prayers at least formed part of the ritual of every well-ordered household. The scene recurs vividly to the mental eye--the dining-room arranged for breakfast, and the master of the house in top-boots and breeches with the family Bible in close proximity to the urn on the table. Mamma very often breakfasted upstairs; but the sons and daughters of the house, perhaps with their toilettes not quite complete, came in with a rush just as the proceedings began, and a long row of maid-servants, headed by the housekeeper and supported by the footmen, were ranged with military precision against the opposite wall. In families of a more pronouncedly religious tone, evening prayers were frequently superadded; and at ten o'clock the assembled guests were aroused from "Squails" or "Consequences" by the entrance of the butler with "Thornton's Family Prayers" on a silver salver. In one very Evangelical house which I knew in my youth, printed prayers were superseded by extempore devotions, and, as the experiment seemed successful, the servants were invited to make their contributions in their own words. As long as only the butler and the housekeeper voiced the aspirations of their fellows, all was well; but, in an evil moment, a recalcitrant kitchenmaid uttered an unlooked-for petition for her master and mistress--"And we pray for Sir Thomas and her Ladyship. Oh! may they have now hearts given them." And the bare suggestion that there was room for such an improvement caused a prompt return to the lively oracles of Henry Thornton.

I note the disappearance of the domestic liturgy; and here again, as in the matter of grace, I submit that, unless the rite can be decently, reasonably, and reverently performed, it is more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Much more significant is the secularization of Sunday. This is not merely a change, but a change conspicuously for the worse. The amount of church-going always differed in different circles; religious people went often and careless people went seldom, but almost every one went sometimes, if merely from a sense of duty and decorum. Mr. Gladstone, whose traditions were Evangelical, thought very poorly of what he called a "once-er," _i.e._ a person who attended divine service only once on a Sunday. He himself was always a "twice-er," and often a "thrice-er"; but to-day it would puzzle the social critic to discover a "twice-er," and even a "once-er" is sufficiently rare to be noticeable.

But far more serious than the decay of mere attendance at church is the complete abolition of the Day of Rest. People, who have nothing to do but to amuse themselves, work at that entrancing occupation with redoubled energy on Sundays. If they are in London, they whirl off to spend the "week-end" amid the meretricious splendours of the stockbroker's suburban paradise; and, if they are entertaining friends at their country houses, they play bridge or tennis or croquet; they row, ride, cycle, and drive, spend the afternoon in a punt, and wind up the evening with "The Washington Post."

All this is an enormous change since the days when the only decorous amusement for Sunday was a visit after church to the stables, or a walk in the afternoon to the home farm or the kitchen garden; and, of course, it entails a corresponding amount of labour for the servants. Maids and valets spend the "week-end" in a whirl of packing and unpacking, and the whole staff of the kitchen is continuously employed.

In old days people used to reduce the meals on Sunday to the narrowest dimensions, in order to give the servants their weekly due of rest and recreation, and in a family with which I am connected the traditional bill of fare for Sunday's dinner, drawn by a cook who lived before the School Board, is still affectionately remembered--

Soup.

Cold Beef.

Salad.

_Cold Sweats._

In brief, respectable people used to eat and drink sparingly on Sunday, caused no unnecessary work, went a good deal to church, and filled up their leisure time by visiting sick people in the cottages or teaching in the Sunday School. No doubt there was a trace of Puritan strictness about the former practice, and people too generally forgot that the First Day of the week is by Christian tradition a feast. Society has rediscovered that great truth. It observes the weekly feast by over-eating itself, and honours the day of rest by over-working its dependants.

LII

SUPERSTITION