The Fashionable World Displayed

by John Owen

It seems, then, that the Law of Honour, by which people of Fashion are said to be governed, is wholly and exclusively designed to make them acceptable to each other. Now, not to mention other things, persons in a Fashionable sphere cannot be strictly agreeable to each other, unless they are well dressed; nor can that intercourse which they chiefly value, be pleasantly maintained, without splendid equipages, choice wines, and sumptuous entertainments. As, therefore, the necessity of the case requires such accommodations, the Law of Honour, to say the least, does not look very nicely into the means by which they may have been procured. Hence it follows, by the fairest inference, that a man of Fashion is not at all the less respectable in his own circle, merely because he is what the rest of the world calls unjust. For, whatever may be the law elsewhere, a man of Fashion can owe nothing to his inferiors: and his character will therefore suffer no stain, though he should have broken his word a thousand times with the reptile that made his clothes, built his carriage, or furnished his table.

This law is also distinguished by many other features of toleration, which well account for the respect and influence that it possesses in the Fashionable World. By a spirit of accommodation, of which there is no other example, it overlooks, if it does not even encourage, a variety of actions, which in the mouth of a moralist would be absolute vices; and which, to say the truth, are scarcely deserving of a much better name. Thus, a man may debauch his tenant’s daughter, seduce the wife of his friend, and be faithless, and even brutal to his own, and yet be esteemed a man of honour, (which is the same as a man of Fashion,) and have a right to make any man fight him who says he is not. In like manner, a man may blaspheme God, and encourage his children and servants to do the same; he may neglect the interests, and squander the property, of his family; he may be a tyrant in his house, and a bully in the streets; he may lie a-bed all day, and drink and game all night; and yet be a most dutiful subject of the Law of Honour, and a shining character in the society of Fashion.

There is, I own, much convenience in all this, and some consistency. Persons who live only for this world, should have a proportionable latitude allowed them for the employment of their animal propensities; and the law which provides for the regulation of their conduct, should have a special reference to this consideration. Supposing, therefore, that people of Fashion ought to exist, they must have such a law as that which they possess. So that, taking the Law of Honour in this connexion, I cannot but think it a master-piece of political contrivance.

At the same time, I cannot agree with those who have been led to consider this table of Fashionable jurisprudence as deserving a place in the temple of Morality. Into this error a celebrated writer appears to have fallen, in his Treatise of Moral Philosophy. For, having defined morality to be “that science which teaches men their duty, and the reasons of it,” he proceeds to cite the Law of Honour as one of the three rules by which men are governed. That respectable writer has, indeed, admitted that this law is defective, because it does not provide for the duties to God and to inferiors; he has also proclaimed that it is bad, by stating, that it allows of fornication, adultery, drunkenness, prodigality, duelling, &c. Still, however, he has rather left us to infer, that it ought wholly to be rejected, than absolutely told us so. By classing it with the law of the land and the Scriptures, he has (undesignedly no doubt) prevented its utter condemnation; and afforded ground for considering it as a moral rule, to which men owe a qualified obedience.

Having specified the sort of practices which the Law of Honour allows, I shall take some brief notice of the duties which it exacts. The principal of these, and that upon which its tone and spirit are most peremptory, is the resentment of injuries. Now it must be observed, that the term injury, in the use of people of Fashion, is of a very wide and comprehensive signification. It not only means such an act of outrage as amounts to a manifest and palpable wrong, but extends to every dubious point of conduct, from which a Fashionable sophist could find scope to infer an injurious intention. Thus a sister seduced, and then abandoned, and a word or a look not satisfactorily explained, are all equally injuries; and constitute, in the spirit of this code, so many obligations to the most lively and implacable resentment. It may be, that the offended person is of a peaceable disposition, and would rather endure a moderate injury than revenge it; or he may have too much respect for the laws of the parent state, to require or accept redress in any other than the legal way; or he may know, that the offending party is a man disposed to seek a quarrel, and that he desires nothing so much as to provoke the innocent person, whom he has purposely insulted, to claim satisfaction; or, lastly, it may be, that the supposed injury is founded wholly on mistake, and that the reputed aggressor will not believe or own himself to have offended, and will therefore make no atonement. In all these cases, personal resentment might as well be waved; but this the Law of Honour positively forbids: and he who should conscientiously decline to pursue a personal quarrel, upon these, or even higher motives, might be a better father, a better husband, a better subject, and a better Christian, for so doing; but he would certainly be a worse man of honour.

It is worthy of remark, that these reputed injuries are sometimes so minute and transitory, or so remote and obscure, that, if every thing depended upon the aggressor and the aggrieved, they would either remain wholly undiscovered, or, at least, be speedily forgotten. But each of these consequences is not unfrequently defeated by the officious industry of some kind-hearted being, who, though he loves his friend too well to let him be insulted, can govern his feelings well enough to stand by and see him murdered. This is, certainly, a refinement upon the theory of friendship, which may be fairly set down among the most extraordinary achievements of the Law of Honour. Indeed, this bloody code has many such refinements. For, proceeding, as it does, upon principles of its own invention, it must necessarily clash with many antecedent obligations. These, however, it contrives, by the help of a little sophistry, so to supersede, that neither affinity nor attachment may impede the progress of honourable revenge: and hence we see, in compliance with its rigid edicts, the warmest friends sacrifice to resentment with as little reserve as the bitterest enemies; and that, perhaps, to settle a tavern dispute, or to avenge a play-house quarrel!

Having said so much of the principal duty enjoined by the Law of Honour, I shall offer a few observations upon the sort of punishment which it inflicts. I trust I shall be excused, if, in treating this part of my subject, I employ the term punishment in a sense not strictly similar to that in which it is ordinarily used. The fact is, that this singular law makes the parties both judges in their own cause, and executioners of their own sentence. The universal award against every convicted offender is, that he shall fight a duel with the offended party. So that, if that may be set down as punishment, which is ultimate in a controversy, and which is exacted as a satisfaction to the law; death, or exposure to it, is the lowest punishment which honour inflicts upon the least offender; and the highest which it enforces upon the greatest.

And this is, I confess, a political incongruity, which I have not a little difficulty in reconciling with the good sense of many who have undertaken to defend it. The law of England has often been blamed (and I think with justice) as unreasonably sanguinary. In answer to this charge it has been said, that, though nearly two hundred offences of almost as many degrees of guilt, are made equally punishable with death; yet justice is administered with so much discretion and mercy, that the penalty is inflicted only on a few. Feeble as this excuse is, for a law that deals in blood, it would be well for the law of Honour if it admitted of such a palliation. But the truth is, that in the latter case there is nothing to abate the demand for blood—the prosecution of every difference is both summary and vindictive: there is no tribunal to enquire into the original matter of the quarrel; no judicature to determine the real merits of the controversy: if the judgment be erroneous, there is no court of equity to reverse the verdict; if rigorous, there is no arm of mercy to withdraw the victim from suffering.

It must be evident from this view which has been presented of the law, that, as an injury may be created by the most trivial incident, so punishment may be inflicted with the most preposterous and unequal retribution. I cannot better illustrate the frivolous foundation upon which an injury may be erected, than by adverting to an occurrence of very recent date, and of sufficient notoriety in the Fashionable World. Two men of Fashion, incensed against each other by an accidental quarrel between their respective dogs, dropped, in their warmth, certain expressions which rendered them amenable to the bloody code: duel was declared indispensable: and in less than twelve hours, one of the two was dispatched into eternity, and the other narrowly escaped the same fate. [42]

The inequality of the retribution is, indeed, an inevitable consequence of that article of the code which compels men of Fashion, without distinction, to decide their differences by fighting a duel. It results from this promiscuous injunction, that the peaceable man must fight the quarrelsome; that the heir of a noble family must meet the ruined esquire; and that the man who has never drawn a trigger in his life, must encounter the Fashionable ruffian, who has all his life been doing little else. This inequality is further manifest, from the different circumstances and connexions of life under which the combatants may be found. The son of many hopes may be matched against the worthless prodigal; the virtuous parent against the unprincipled seducer; and the man of industry, usefulness, and beneficence, against the miscreant who only lives to pamper his lusts, and to corrupt his fellow-creatures. Nothing has here been said of the indiscriminate manner in which judgment is executed. The innocent and the guilty must both be involved in the same awful contingency; each must put his life to hazard: and the probability is, that, if one of the two should fall, it will be the man whose conduct least entitled him to punishment, and whose life was most worth preserving.