"Measure for Measure."
Cultured gentility is one of the signs of the times. Snobbishness is a deep-seated vice of human beings, and a trait of the gregarious mammalia, with which the human snob, when he is more than ordinarily ignorant, disclaims relationship. When Darwin told people that their early progenitors were hairy and ape-like, with prehensile feet, great canine teeth, and tails equipped with the proper muscles, all the Respectables jeered at him, and said that they were "only a little lower than the angels," and that monkeys must have been fashioned as travesties of men. But though we have moved upwards, "working out of the beast," Man still exhibits race prejudice, patriotic bias, and the low instinct of class exclusiveness. Perhaps at no period of our social evolution have we been more cultured, and yet more vulgar, than at the present time. Such a juxtaposition may appear to indicate that a little knowledge for the masses is not without its disadvantages as well as its blessing. The proletarian of the sixteenth century could not read nor write; but he was probably less vulgar than those among his descendants whose acquaintance with modern literature is restricted to the gutter library of cuts and snips and racing tips. Simple, merry Dick trolled "Old Rose"; flash 'Arry and his blatant mates hiccough the staccato of "Glorious Beer."
Contemporaneous with a widespread vulgarity of thought and a hideous banality of living, there is an immense development of culture. Nowadays it is the fashion to "go in" for "culture," and in society you must know, or affect to know, something about evolution, the higher criticism, Ibsen, Whistler's pictures, and Chippendale furniture. You may learn much about these, and be "smart" at the same time; for smartness and culture go hand-in-hand to the "crushes" and "at homes," and are as brother and sister one to the other. To use a phrase from the vocabulary of culture-cum-smartness, you are "not in the running" if you have merely mastered the theory of the universal germ, and neglected to practise the skirt dance or the plantation song.
Once upon a time, the philosopher and the man of letters came out and was separate from amongst the crowd. He lived mostly in the seclusion of his library, which was neither good for his understanding nor his digestion. But he forewent the pomps of smart society, partly because smart society did not wish to be bored, and partly owing to his enlightened instinct of Bohemianism, which found wholesome gratification in the unostentatious amenities of the literary symposium, the forgathering with one or two of his craft at the historic "Cheshire Cheese" or the "Cock Tavern." He dressed himself with a certain careless distinction; he drank cider with Porson, and spent ambrosial nights in the fumes from churchwardens with genial Lamb, Hazlitt, Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Landor. These were men of culture who refused to hover on the fringe of a shallow, fashionable society, not because they were intellectual snobs, but because their pursuits were on a higher plane than the frivolities of Respectability.
Wordsworth dwelt remote among the hills; De Quincey led laborious days in the solitude of Mavis Bush; Shelley lived unknown of his neighbours at Marlow; and Landor, "a noble-looking old man, badly dressed in shabby snuff-clothes, a dirty old blue necktie and unstarched cotton shirt," lived chiefly aloof in Florence. None of these qualified themselves for lionisation in society. The arts of gentility are not compatible with the study of science and philosophy.
Ampère, the scientific investigator, went one day to dine with Madame Beauregard. His hands were stained by a drug which leaves its mark on the skin for several days. Poor Ampère! what did he in a company where externals count for all a man is worth? His hostess could not dine with one whose hands were soiled in the interest of posterity: "I promised not to return there before my hands were white. Of course, I shall never enter the house again," wrote Ampère to his wife. And have we not read how Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were mistaken by a finical lady for a pair of working men when she saw them conversing together?
But we have fallen upon different days. The philosopher has been lured from his den; the poets have come down from Parnassus to sport with the nymphs of Philistia, the intellectual rogue elephant has been tamed to "caper nimbly in my lady's chamber," and the recusant and the pariah sat down to table with the imposing dignitaries of the Church and State. It may be well on the whole, but these gracious concessions from the Philistine are not without their perils for the philosopher and the artist. Even the wisest of them cannot always escape the moral and mental deterioration that comes of being au fait in the whiffles and frothy small talk of drawing-rooms, the parlour tricks and pretty deportments; and the donning of a chimney-pot hat and a dress coat is often the first step on the downward career of the intellectual. Have we not seen it? One season will transform the modest, single-hearted, plain-living artist or student into a vain, insufferable, intellectual mountebank. A few months of interviewing, and "log-rolling," and posturing in Mayfair, and you change your ideas, stultify your conscience, and degenerate into a Respectable. It is almost inevitable. We are all sweetly human, and vanity is one of our prime characteristics. Most of us, also, as some critic of life observes, would rather be "the chief of a committee of four than the unknown benefactor of our species." An author of mediocre ability, possessing that quality of self-assertiveness known commonly as "side," can far outpace the shy genius in the race for public esteem. The brazen bumptiousness and supercilious disdain of the mere talent which lacks astute worldly wisdom are the components of the snobbishness that makes for social success. Society closes the door upon the needy philosopher in his threadbare garb; but it throws its portals wide to welcome the adept of claptrap, whose higher philosophy is the study of the main chance.
I do not applaud the intellectual exclusiveness with which some of the cultured attempt to keep their immaculate souls unspotted from the world. We want no Respectability of pedants and book-worms. Erudition is worthy of the highest respect; but the erudite snob is imperfectly cultivated. He is frequently more ignorant of many important phases of life than the sheer illiterates whom he pities for a narrowness of judgment upon men. Who can gainsay Sir Thomas Browne, when he writes: "It is an unjust way of compute to magnify a weak head for some Latin abilities; and to under-value a solid judgment because he knows not the genealogy of Hector"? It is difficult to dissociate arrogance from ignorance, even when we know that the arrogant man is learned. Snobbishness is a mark of shallowness.
Undoubtedly, many men and women of genius have evinced the specific snobbery of culture. Shakspere, Jonson, Victor Hugo, and Turguenieff, are great figures that suggest exceptions to the rule. Carlyle is a bad case of playing to the Respectables; for, despite his loudly-proclaimed reverence for humanity, his vanity, like that of Antisthenes, peered through the rents in his cloak. In extolling the imposers of brute force in the community, the sage displayed a tendency to cajole the oppressing class, for whom he had about as much real sympathy as the Southerner has for the negro race. He jeered at and snubbed his contemporary writers; he despised mere literary artists; he told a now eminent novelist that he was "ganging to the de'il by the very vulgarest road"; he described Lecky as "a willow-pattern sort o' man, voluble but harmless, a pure herbivorous, nay, mere graminivorous creature;" he called Landor a "wild man," and sighed "over the spectacle of the commonplace torn to rags;" Maurice was "uninteresting ... twisted, screwed, wiredrawn;" and it is said that the most he could say for George Meredith was that he was "nae fule." To a host of minor essayists, journalists, and literary hangers-on, Carlyle set that fashion of priggishness and snobbery that prevails so widely at the present time.
What a mighty and fearsome foe to knowledge is Academic Respectability. Beneath its sway the seats of learning become fusty abiding-places of mouldy pedantry. It posts its wary lackeys at every avenue of research to warn back adventurous explorers, with their theological or political red flags and notice boards. Academic Respectability expelled Shelley. It frowns upon Bain, Francis Newman, and other bold investigators and scholars of modern times. It killed Socrates, persecuted Spinoza, insulted David Hume, sneered at Buckle, and derided Darwin. De Quincey tells us that he scarcely spoke to a soul while he was at Worcester College, Oxford. Was the pensive opium-eater thoroughly overawed or depressed by the Respectability of the classic city? Possibly those were the days of the genesis of the "Oxford manner," that supercilious drawling affectation of superior sapience which characterises the sons of bourgeois families at Alma Mater.