Thus the laws of middle class orthodoxy were subjected to a process of general relaxation like to what, rightly or wrongly, was fancied to have taken place in more exalted circles. Clubs for private theatricals followed the subscription dances, in suburban town halls. Bayswater wanderers or South Kensington shooting stars reproduced some theatrical favourite from the repertory of the Prince of Wales’s or the Gaiety on the amateur boards of Westbourne Grove, Brompton, or Chelsea. In all things the accredited exemplars of the latest and most cosmopolitan mode were followed by the younger generation of the classes that conventionally were still regarded as strongholds of the ethical severity which Puritan ancestors handed down. The development was of course inevitable. In the long run it will not be found to have done any harm. But incidentally it has involved a considerable modification of the old ideas and habits of many hundreds among Her Majesty’s subjects whose special attribute was once supposed to be, in Froissart’s phrase, ‘to take their pleasures sadly.’ Lord’s Cricket Ground on an Eton and Harrow match day; the Hyde Park Magazine as the meeting point of the Four-in-Hand Club; any one of some half-dozen eating houses bordering on Bond Street, frequented under a Gallic title by the home-staying Briton; these have ceased to be the appanage of Belgravia or Mayfair alone; the crowd which resorts to them is quite as representative of the newest interests as of the oldest acres.
In theory and in practice ‘society’ considers itself, and to some extent is still, a close corporation. It is bordered by a fringe not always easily to be distinguished from the holy fabric itself. Its doings are more and more moved by influences originating outside its own limits. If this were not so Lord Beaconsfield would not have been able truthfully to say in his last novel Endymion that London which during the earlier days of the Queen’s reign was a very dull place had now become a most amusing one. No one knew the capital better or during his later years had tasted of its lighter pleasures more discriminatingly than the critic who made this remark.
As the English race owes much of its vitality and vigour to the variety of the elements, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, of which it is a fusion, so English society would long since have been disintegrated by its own power of boredom and its own monotony of texture unless it had extensively recruited itself by alien elements as diverse and as invigorating as those with which the House of Lords, eagle-like, periodically and wisely renews its youth. The personal preferences, prejudices, predilections, of the old and unreformed social polity remain. The tradition of an aristocracy is unbroken though the system has undergone additions so organic.
In many places the Victorian squire and lord of the manor is not in the present year a direct or indirect descendant of those who at the Queen’s Accession were settled on the estate he holds, and who inhabited the house wherein he dwelt. The idea of such a change of tenure or of an alienation of family rents to a race of strangers would have shocked the ancestor and might even thrill his mouldering remains in the family vault with horror. As a fact, however, the passage from the old to the new régime has involved no revolution nor even much abruptness in development. The truth is, the estate was so heavily dipped, whether by mortgages or dower charges; the margin left for irregular expenditure was so narrow, as to leave the property in a chronic instability of equilibrium; a longer succession of bad seasons than usual, one or two farms unexpectedly without tenants; these experiences would not be felt by the territorial magnate, nor by a landlord who had other sources of income than his acres. Such incidents are quite enough to reduce the small squire to practical indigence. His children have to be educated, though his farms may be unlet; his sons’ bills must be paid; his daughters portioned off in marriage. Instead, therefore, of sitting at the head of his table in the old Hall at his ‘rent dinner,’ the squire, one of a long race of squires, has transported his family to economical quarters in Bath or Clifton, Brighton or Boulogne, where living is tolerably cheap, opportunities of education are plentiful, and society of a sort is forthcoming. Or if since Lord Cairns’ Settled Estates Act modifications of entail have removed the earlier difficulties in the way of land transfer, the family connection with the property may have ceased altogether; the estate may have passed into the hands of some lawyer, banker or trader belonging to the county town; of some manufacturing plutocrat from the further North; of some mill owner whose successful ventures have made him a millionaire. But the life lived at the Hall or Court, or Manor, whichever it may be, under its new proprietors violates few of the old traditions.
The squire of to-day, who was the banker, solicitor, or brewer of yesterday, reproduces very successfully the existence of the more ancient predecessors whom events have caused him to expropriate. His son is at the same school, at the same college, or in the same regiment as the son of his predecessor; his daughters are not less fond than the daughters of his predecessor of riding to the meet, or of driving in state to the county ball. He himself is more diligent in the business of quarter sessions, transferred to County Council, than the squire before him was; his wife is not likely to neglect the duties of the parish Lady Bountiful; her poultry yard may be decimated by Reynard; her husband refuses on that account to connive at the enormity of shooting a fox. Rather will he take a pride in being able to boast that when there is a meet on his property, the coverts are never drawn blank. In due time he may accede to the mastership of the subscription pack which more liberally than his predecessor he supports. The last squire was a judge of horses and cattle at the County Show; the new squire will doubtless in due course fill that position; meanwhile, though he may have been born in a warehouse and bred at a desk, his taste for shorthorn breeding is worthy of an exclusively territorial lineage; he himself plays as well as dresses the part to perfection, and might be matched for tramping across stubble or plough and bringing down partridges against the least commercial of the squirearchy.
This is only typical of what during many years has been taking place among all classes. A discreetly generous administration of the Poor Law operates in the long run as an insurance payment against revolution. The fusion of classes not less than the organization of professions or enterprise is the keynote of our epoch. The process has, without an exception, been one of levelling up, not down. The classes called indifferently higher, or older, have proved to possess an unexpected aptitude for communicating the tastes, the pursuits, the habits, the very instincts, which have descended to them from their forefathers, to the newcomers that the distribution of wealth, the opportunities of industry, the innumerable vicissitudes of life, have incorporated gradually into themselves. Thus it has come to pass that society in England, in itself the most miscellaneous of all conceivable composites, is saturated throughout and cemented as to its different parts by a real homogeneity. The method of attainment has varied, will continue to vary infinitely; the ideal standard remains uniform. In most country districts, the notable exceptions being the mining regions of the North, or the aggressively Nonconformist portions of Wales, the old J.Ps. where their qualities entitle them to do so, have as a preceding chapter has shown held their own against their new colleagues on the County Councils. The achievement finds its exact counterpart in the broader and more purely social processes just described.
That which has been called the restless, the aspiring, self-assertive, inquisitive spirit of the age is not confined in its manifestations to any section of the community, urban or rural, territorial or commercial, of gentle or ungentle birth. It has been accompanied by a distinct change in the figure and in the general appearance of the English youth of both sexes. Suppose an Englishman who had left his country at an early period of the present reign, and who, having made his fortune in the Colonies, had returned to pass the residue of his days in his native land. What are the changes that would most impress his mind? It cannot be doubted that foremost among these would be the visible obliteration of the conventional distinction between the aristocracies of birth and money, the oligarchies of manufacture and of land. As from the window of his club, from his seat in the hotel coffee-room, from his position at the theatre, the opera, or from his chair in Hyde Park, he watched the representatives of the new order which during a few decades had sprung up in the old country, he would be aware of an improved expression of countenance upon the faces of the quietly and well dressed young men, of figures taller, better set up, and better carried, among the young women as well.
The ideal of English womanhood as represented in the sketches of George du Maurier is a faithful generalization from actual life, historically accurate in all its essential details. Even the lofty stature since the bicycle began to develop certain muscles and parts of the human frame, is now seen to be no figment of the artist’s imagination. The feminine forms which, towering majestically above the thrones of wheelwork, look down upon the dwarfed passenger or equestrian, are to-day perceived to have been presented on no exaggerated scale in the pages of Punch. English women have always had a beauty and a durability of attractiveness unique throughout the world. It is only of late years that to these qualities, consequently on improvements on their physical regimen, the maids and matrons of Britain have added a certain Junonian majesty of proportion that John Leech could not depict simply because in his day it did not exist, but that is portrayed with the fidelity of historic truth by the pencil of John Leech’s successor. This latter development has been an unmixed good. The transition from the eventless purely domesticated existence to the locomotive, semi-public, generally unsettling, and exciting life in the case of the future wives and mothers of middle class Englishmen, has had its transient disadvantages. It was not indeed to be expected, nor was it possible, that the change from samplers and school rooms to skating rinks, lawn tennis tournaments, bicycle grounds, and suppers after the play at restaurants, could be accomplished with perfect smoothness, or that the bread-and-butter miss described by Byron should without any jar to the nerves of her compatriots develop into the girl of the period, though on a less aggressive scale than she was once sketched by a popular novelist in a famous article. The most circumspect of chaperons, the most drastic of duennas cannot ensure her charges against sometimes making ineligible acquaintance on these public pleasure grounds. The records of the Law Courts show that the dancing youths of subscription ballrooms, in the suburbs, are not invariably conducive to the domestic happiness of middle class homes. The development was to be expected. The percentage of friction or scandal was inevitable. As Brummel’s valet said of his master’s crumpled neckcloths: ‘These are our failures;’ in other words, they are the social miscarriages incidental to the strangeness of the new order. As the class now spoken of becomes more habituated to the cosmopolitan modes which it has assumed, the rôle will doubtless be played without any misadventures.
Nothing less than a progress from insularity to cosmopolitanism is the social enterprise in which the upper classes led the way, and in which those who are always ready to imitate their example have followed them. The fashion is not yet fully acclimatised. For that reason carping critics, unjustly perhaps, have suggested that English families who take their holiday at Boulogne-sur-Mer would do well not to carry with them on their return to their suburban homes in England the social usages which flourish in the Assembly Rooms of an Anglicized French watering-place.