I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed for the better?
It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives and Lazarus, with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800, when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school," which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might re-enter."
We do not, I think, see much of the "beautiful form" nowadays. Men when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived. Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough, the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville, "When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet." If you encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low. That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity. Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.
Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer, you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they were related.
A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and Lord Curzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would not have been advanced.
The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll, and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.
XLIV
PUBLICITY V. RETICENCE