Asks the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time.
With an encumbered property, diminishing rent-roll, and expenses beyond his income,
The question which confronts him at every corner is, whence will the needful "tin" come?
And when they prate to us about our "improvidence," and advise us to "cut down" and economize, why, where, in the name of patience, I ask'll
Be the pull of being a Country Gentleman at all, if one has to live like a retired pork-butcher or prosperous publican, and perhaps you will answer
That question, Mr. Charles Milnes Gaskell![8]
Of the fine Old Country Gentleman, one of the modern time.
The "profiteer" was already in Society and on the moors; Punch reviled him in "My 'art's in the 'Ighlands," and in a picture of an opulent Semite swearing that he hasn't "a drop of Hebrew blood in ma veinth, 'thelp me." Du Maurier created Sir Gorgius Midas as typical of the New Plutocracy—a gross, bediamonded figure, surrounded by flunkeys, with Dukes and Duchesses as his pensioners. The alleged poverty-stricken condition of the aristocracy is a frequent theme: one ducal family can only afford to go to the opera when Sir Gorgius lends them his box. But the Dukes still had their uses. The Beresford Midases put their boy's name down both for Eton and Harrow, and decided to send him to whichever has most "dooks" when the time comes. The New Rich show themselves apt pupils in all the snobbery of rank. For example, Sir Gorgius is shocked at the innovation of ladies and gentlemen riding in or on omnibuses. This is not documentary evidence, of course, but it was perfectly legitimate caricature. Du Maurier was not attacking the self-made man whose creed is summed up in the Lancashire saying: "Them as 'as brass don't care a damn what them as 'asn't thinks on 'em." He bestowed his ridicule impartially on the servile plutocrats who aped the customs of the titled classes, and the aristocrats who were unable to grow poor with dignity. Du Maurier's contribution to the social history of the middle and later Victorian age was invaluable on its critical and satirical side. But he was emphatically an aristocrat in the sense that he believed in good manners and fine physique: he set beauty above rank or riches, and was an early apostle of Eugenics. Long before the cult of athletics had begun to affect the stature and build of English girls, he devoted his pencil to glorifying the Junoesque type of English beauty. And while none of Punch's artists ever paid more consistent homage to elegance and distinction of feature and figure, he could be on occasion a merciless satirist of the physical deterioration brought about by intermarriage amongst the old nobility. Thus in 1880 he showed a ridiculous little degenerate affectionately rebuking his effete parents for "interfering in his affairs," with the result that he is "under 5 feet 1 inch, can't say Boh to a goose, and justly passes for the gweatest guy in the whole county."
The same spirit is shown in the fantastic contrast between the aristocracies of the past and the future. The scene is "an island in British Oceana"; the time 1989, a hundred years later than the date of the picture:—
His Highness the Grand Duke of Gerolstein: "Ach! Miss Prown—in your lôfly bresence I forket my zixty-vour kvarterings. I lay my Ditle at your Veet. Bitte! pecome ze Crant Tochess of Gerolstein!"
Miss Brown: "Your Highness also forgets that I have sixty-four Quarterings!"
His Highness: "Ach! How is dat, Miss Prown?"
Miss Brown: "Why, my father and mother, my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, my sixteen great-great-grandparents, and my thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents were all certified over six foot six inches, perfect in form and feature, and with health and minds and manners to match, or they would not have been allowed to marry. And though I'm the shortest and plainest girl in the colony, I should never be allowed to marry anyone so very much beneath myself as your Highness!"