XX
The Dukes of Dorset were not merely men with titles; they were ducal Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder at the idea of a banquet; who are no longer those rotund, well-larded figures of convention that drank incredible quantities of fruity port and turtle-soup. That must be an effete generation whose new-rich no longer strew their way with dropped aitches; whose paupers, instead of skilly, dine royally off the best joints, and eat the finest bread, and when they ask for more—get it. In short, your typical pauper, millionaire, alderman, or duke no longer exists in real life. Even the novelists have learned their lesson and know better. Only on the stage shall you find those outmoded figures still strutting, and even there they are on their last legs. The stage is the last ditch of convention; but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as ever was Robertson.
The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title, and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his title. Some are bored men and commonplace; most of them “splendidly null,” as Tennyson might say. I know an undersized duke with a limp and a falsetto voice, who takes photographs with a hand-camera and an apologetic manner; and another with the appearance and carriage of an unsuccessful commercial traveller. They would be ashamed to be ducal in their behaviour; and it is quite certain that their forbears would be ashamed of them.
To view Knole intimately is not given to the many. What are seventeen rooms out of three hundred and sixty-five, even though they be rooms of State! In fact it is rather in the more ordinary rooms, if any of those at Knole can so be styled, that you read its everyday story of old. After all, the Lords of Knole were not always entertaining kings and great nobles. Sometimes they had a “day off,” no less than the British workman of this era of ours, and then they were a thought more easy and less splendid, and occupied the second-best rooms, just as the ordinary Briton of to-day does, when he is not wanting to “show off.”
I am afraid we all want to impress the visitor with a magnificence that is not kept up when he is gone. The lower-class parlour, the drawing-room of the upper strata, are the superstitions not only of to-day, or of one or two classes. They probably go back to the beginning of things, when even Prehistoric Man had his ordinary cave to live in and his extraordinary, in which his wife “received.”
THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE.
Photo by C. Essenhigh Corke & Co.
There are thus whole suites of ancient rooms at Knole, now silent and deserted; and overhead, above the long galleries of stately magnificence, are interminable attics, called “wardrobes,” not because of being storerooms of clothes, old or new; but presumably the playrooms of the boys and lads of good family who, after the old English custom, were sent to Knole under wardship of the noble owners, to learn the usages of good society and the duties of chivalrous knights. In short, Knole, and every other castle or stately mansion, was, as it were, a training-college, a seminary of deportment and knightly devoirs; and in them one learned that good form whose inculcation is supposed to be the only value of Oxford and Cambridge at this day.
THE “DUMB BELL.”
An odd surviving relic of Knole as a College of Good Manners is the curious contrivance known as the “Dumb Bell,” in that one of these wardrobes styled the “Dumb Bell Gallery.” It very closely resembles the windlass seen over old country wells, with a roller on which is wound a rope that descends through a hole cut in the floor, into the billiard-room. The arms projecting from the roller are iron, tipped with lead. This machine, which appears to date back to about the beginning of the seventeenth century, is thought to have been in the nature of a “home exerciser,” and to have been suggested by the bell-ropes and the exercise of bell-ringing in church towers. Here, however, the athlete could bring up his muscles without being a nuisance to every one within earshot. From this originated the name of those very different objects, used however for the same purpose of exercising—the modern “dumb-bells.”