“Sure no one knows what church you go to on a Sunday; and the other day your coat was buttoned up to the chin; for all the world as if you had cause to conceal your linen or the want of it.”
Even Miss Lollypop, though but just in her teens, and fresh from the nursery, takes part in the debate, and raises her shrill voice in condemnation.
“I can’t bear him, mamma,” says she; “and I won’t remain in the room when he comes. How can he dare to pinch my cheek as if I were but a child?”
And you, O unsuspecting stranger, have no idea of the sensation which your knock produces throughout the house; and when, on going away, Sir John shakes hands with you, and sees you to the door, asking you to call again, you are, perhaps—continental as you are—cautious enough to consider all this as a mark of cheap and common politeness! You are mistaken. Sir John lays great stress on his religious observance of the ordinances of old English family life, and he quotes, with much emphasis, the following paragraph of that most explicit of all unpublished law books:—
“And in case the stranger, male or female, doth, by a comely form and demure carriage, gain thy British heart, then shalt thou, when he or she departeth, give his or her hand a hearty shake, to signify and prove thereby that he or she shall always be welcome at thy table, at thy fireside, and in the spare bedroom which is on thy premises. But if thou dost not like him or her, then his or her hand shall not be so shaken.”
Robert Baxter, Esq., or, simply Mr. Baxter, as we by this time are accustomed to call him, had, thanks to his friend and eulogist, no difficulties whatever to contend with. He marched in with flying colours. He came, saw, and conquered. The “hearty shake of the hand” was resolved upon before he had emptied his first cup of tea at our fireside. By this time, he is the most intimate friend of the family; he comes and goes away at his liking—takes the children out in his gig—and has, in short, made such progress in the space of a very few weeks, that, in direct violation of another paragraph of the family ordinances, he lays hands even on the sacred poker, and actually pokes the fire with it; a privilege which, according to law, should not be conceded, even to a friend, before the expiration of the seventh year of amicable intercourse.
Let no one fancy that these remarks are an introduction to a novellistic plot. To dispel all suspicions on this head, I proceed at once to unmask Dr. Keif’s abominable perfidy—one which the ladies of the house vow they will forgive, but which they cannot forget. Only fancy their disappointment! Keif’s “Don Juan,” his “amiable hero,” his “capital fellow,” for thus it pleased the doctor to call him—Mr. Baxter, in fact, is a grey-haired old man. Dr. Keif was cunning enough to excuse the incorrectness of his description by pleading short-sightedness. “It never had struck him—indeed it had not—and,—
“After all,” said our learned friend; “though not exactly young, Mr. Baxter is youthful. His whiskers, for instance, are brown; and his large, clear eyes, how free and open do they look at all and everything! Has he not an aristocratic hand? Is not his chin round, his forehead white, and his toilet irreproachable? In short, the more I think of it, the more firmly am I persuaded, that Mr. Baxter is quite a Don Juan if compared with your absurd London greenhorns, whose lengthy faces make all the French shop-girls in Regent-street gape.”
“True!” said I. “In my opinion, Mr. Baxter’s grey hair is his best recommendation, for none but children and old men are truly amiable in England. No creature on earth more excels in charming merriness and bold natural freshness, than your little freeborn, trouserless Briton. But the moment the boy sports the very ghost of a stray hair on his upper lip—the moment he lays in a stock of razors and stiff shirt collars—that very moment does your English boy undergo a most shocking metamorphosis, and one which even Doyle would despair to depict. The ‘Flegeljahre’—the period of sowing wild oats—with other nations a mere transition period, scarcely longer than a northern spring, is, in the case of an Englishman, protracted through ten years and more. With the very brightest character it lasts up to six-and-twenty; but it also frequently happens that the modern Englishman, like unto Tully’s Roman, remains an ‘adolescens’ up to forty. There is something altogether indescribable in this English Flegeljahr character. Fancy a cross between an unctuous missionary and a fast under-graduate, duly coated, cravated brushed up and dressed out for the dining-room; and you will have a tolerably approximating idea of the Flegel-youth, who eager to be very respectable and romantic at one and the same time, succeeds in appearing either insufferably tedious or unconstitutionally comical. Is it their hypochondriacal climate? So do the continentals ask every year, when the English exodus arrives on their shores. Or is it Church and State? Is it a fault of education, or a want of digestion, which causes these wealthy, tall islanders, with their red faces and costly coats, to stand forth so queer, and out of the common order of human creatures? They are neat to perfection, and got up regardless of expense in all their details; but take the fellow as a whole, and you find him mighty unsavoury.
“You will find the reason neither in the fog, nor in constitutional liberty. No Act of Parliament forbids a man to cultivate the graces; and the climate enacts flannel only, but by no means the ‘Zopf.’ It is not a want of education, but a superabundance of it. It is the education of a rigidly puritanical governess, whose name we never pronounce without a feeling of secret awe. That governess is more fervently adored than the Established Church; people fear her more than they did the Spanish Inquisition. As Fate sat enthroned in mysterious majesty above the gods of Greece, so does this cruel mistress lord it over Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus, and all the other glories of Old England. Her name is Gentility! Liberty of the Press and popular agitation avail not against her. The Commons of England have conquered the strongholds of Toryism; Mr. Cobden and his Cotton Lords have trampled Protection under foot, and light is being let even into the gloomy caverns of Chancery. But what agitator dares to league the cunningly separated classes of English society against only one of the one thousand three hundred positive and negative enactments of Gentility, whereby the favoured people of the isles are distinguished from the pagans of the continent—from the immoral, uneducated barbarians—from those ‘soap-renouncing’ foreigners! Who liberates the freeborn Briton from the fear of ‘losing caste’ (a genuine British phrase this!), which follows him as his shadow, whithersoever he may direct his steps—which haunts him even in rural retirement—and which, in a town containing near three millions of inhabitants, admits not even of one single circle of free and general sociability! At a political meeting, perhaps, there may exist something like an approximation of the upper and lower classes, and peers and draymen, cheese-mongers and guardsmen, may, on such occasions, breathe the same air, and fill it with their cheers and groans. But I will rather believe that St. Peter’s of Rome and St. Paul’s of London can come together, than that the cousin of a Right Honourable will knowingly, and with tolerance prepense, eat his dinner at the same table with the keeper of a cheese-shop.