" 'I can see the wind,' I said. . . .
" 'See the wind! And what's it like?' said she looking up and laughing.
" It's the most beautiful thing I ever saw. . . . Look over the top of the brown heath with a steady eye and see if thou canst discern a remarkably bright substance, brighter than glass or pearly water, deeply clear and lucid, swimming, not like a stream, but like a quick spirit, up and down and forward, as if hurrying to be gone.'
" 'Nonsense, there is not anything.'
" 'Look again, steady for a moment.'
" 'There is,' she said, 'there is; I see it! O! what a beautiful thing. . . .'
" 'That is the wind of heaven,' I said, 'now sweeping over the earth and visible. It is the great element of vitality, water quickened by fire, the spirit of life.' "l
For all the new influences that were beginning to destroy it, there was still a strong hierarchical sense in the country. The people were not servile—in defence of their rights they could be excessively obstinate—but they took great pride in personal status and privilege and in the operational skills which these generally symbolised. In the country house—the headquarters of the nation's greatest industry and as yet its largest economic unit—an elaborately graded system existed in which every man and woman had his or her place. The housekeeper whom Simond encountered at Chiswick was "a stately old dame, very cross and surly"; she had her rights which she made it clear to the whole world she meant to keep. In the larger establishments of the higher aristocracy there were sometimes as many as a dozen servants' sitting-rooms, carefully graded to the status of their users. At Wentworth Woodhouse seventy sat down every day to dine in the servants' hall; at Blenheim there were eighty house servants and a hundred out of doors.2 In its more elegant way all this somewhat resembled the Government departments of our own day, and grew on the same cumulative principle. To those impatient of delay and waste of human effort it could be very irritating; Wellington once remarked that he brushed his own clothes and regretted that he had not time to clean his boots, for the presence of a crowd of idle, officious fellows annoyed him more than he could say. To most, however, of the participants in this easy-going, rule-of-thumb English hierarchy the conventions seemed satisfactory enough. Simond found, not only that English domestics were more obliging and industrious than those elsewhere, but that they looked better pleased and happier. If their status was defined towards those above them, it was equally defined towards those below; they might sleep in attics but they lived on the fat of the land and shared the dignity of their masters. There was a decently modulated avenue of advancement that provided for both mediocrity and talent. Mary Mitford's
1 Bamford, II, 334-5. See idem, I, 87, 102, 115-24, 236; II, 340; Cooper, 63-5, 91; Colvin, Keats, 135; Howitt, 206-8; Leigh Hunt, Autobiography, II, 2; Lamb, VIII, 580; Mitford, Literary Life, 104-5; Old Oak, 75.
2 Simond, II, 84,105,119. See Bamford, II, 204; Creevey, Life and Times, 214-15; Farington, VIII, 98; Holland, Journal, I, 56; Howitt, 22-7; Newton, 93; Willis, III, 311.
friend, twelve-year-old Joe Kirby, promoted from the farm to the manor house where he cleaned the shoes, rubbed the knives and ran errands, "a sort of prentice to the footman," would, she predicted, one day overtop his chief and rise to be butler. His sisters went into service in the great house at fourteen and stayed till they married, learning there lessons of neatness, domestic skill and respect for quality of all kinds. If deference were a product of English country house life, slatternliness was not. It graded men and women but civilised them. Like the monasteries whose social place it had taken, it made for comfort, culture and order.
At the apex of this hierarchy was a type which, at its best, commanded admiration and often affection. The ruling principle of English society was the conception of a gentleman. Good breeding was not merely a mark of social distinction but a rule for the treatment of others. It made few concessions to the ideal of equality; men, it was held, were born to varying lots, and in 1815 one took these distinctions as one found them. But a gentleman was expected to treat his fellow creatures of all ranks openly and frankly, even when it meant sacrificing his interests to do so. A gentleman did not tell a lie, for that was cowardice; he did not cheat, go back on his word or flinch from the consequences of his actions. When Lord Sefton succeeded to his estates he at once settled—and without question—a gambling debt for £40,000 alleged to have been incurred by his father at Crockford's.1
A man's reputation as a gentleman was looked on as his most valuable possession. Any action, or even association, incompatible with it was regarded as a stain which must be immediately expunged. This accounted for the extreme sensitivity with which public men reacted to any slight on their honour, vindicating it, if necessary, in some dawn encounter with pistols on suburban common or foreign beach. Pitt, Castlereagh, Canning, Wellington and Peel all risked their lives in this way while holding high office. "How constantly, even in the best works of fiction," wrote a critic, giving his reasons for supposing the author of Waverley to be a gentleman, "are we disgusted with offences against all generous principle, as the reading of letters by those for whom they were not intended, taking advantage of accidents to overhear private conversation, revealing what in honour should have remained secret, plotting against men as enemies
1 Gronow, II, 110-11.
and at the same time making use of their services, dishonest practices on the sensibilities of women by their admirers, falsehoods, not always indirect, and by an endless variety of low artifices which appear to be thought quite legitimate if carried on through subordinate agents." It was one of the reasons for the immense affection in which Scott was held that he never deviated from honourable standards. A gentleman, at his best, was one who raised the dignity of human nature—noble, fearless, magnanimous. When the Governor-General of Canada, the Duke of Richmond, learnt that he was suffering from hydrophobia, he never breathed a word of his impending doom, but performed his social duties with the same calm and dignified bearing to the dreadful end. "Throughout the whole of his career," Gronow wrote of Wellington, "he always placed first and foremost, far above his military and social honours, his position as an English gentleman." The founders of Sandhurst laid it down that the professional education of British officers ought to aim at producing, not corporals, but gentlemen. So long as it did so, they knew it would produce the kind of leaders Englishmen would follow.
A gentleman was under an obligation to be generous; he held his possessions like his life on terms. The very flies at Petworth, wrote Haydon, seemed to know that there was room for their existence; dogs, horses, cows, deer and pigs, peasantry and servants, guests and family, all shared in Lord Egremont's bounty and opulence.1 If there was anything the English despised more than a coward, it was a skint. "It is not only a received thing," wrote Simond, "that an Englishman has always plenty of money and gives it away very freely, but no sacrifice of a higher kind is supposed to be above his magnanimity." The Duke of Buccleuch in times of agricultural distress left his farm rents uncollected and refrained from visiting London that he might have the cash to pay his retainers; Lord Bridgewater never refused work to any local man, and during times of unemployment increased his Ashridge establishment from five to eight hundred.2 Captain Sawyer of East Burnham—one of the older school of squires—always allowed his poor tenants as much driftwood and "lop and top" from his plantations as they wanted. Though there were plenty of harsh landlords who rack-rented their
1 Haydon, Life, II, 140-1. Simond (II, 250) records that Lord Egremont allowed his farm workers to play bowls and cricket on his lawns and even write their names on his walls and windows.
2 Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 23rd Jan., 1822; Lockhart, IV, 218; Howitt, 56.
estates to finance their extravagances, and many more who, absorbed in their pleasures, refused to be troubled, there were thousands of others who, treating their poorer neighbours with kindness and consideration, preserved social distinctions by taking the resentment out of them.
Tom Purdy, the Abbotsford gamekeeper, who weekly pledged the laird and his guests at their Sunday dinner in a quaigh of whisky, no more felt a sense of injustice against Walter Scott for being his master than did the latter's dog, Maida. Nor did the pageboy, whose exercise book the great writer regularly corrected.1
The ideal of equality which had so intoxicated the French, had as yet made little impression on the British mind. Whenever Squire Lambton, with his £70,000 a year, visited his northern home, the Durham colliers turned out in thousands to draw his carriage. It was injustice and tyranny that this pugnacious people resented, not privilege. "Gentlemen are, or ought to be, the pride and glory of every civilised country," wrote Bewick, himself a radical; "without their countenance arts and sciences must languish, industry be paralysed and barbarism rear its stupid head." Bamford, for all his life of rebellion, wrote with nostalgia of the freedom that had existed, in his youth between the gentry and their tenants. "There were no grinding bailiffs and land-stewards in those days to stand betwixt the gentleman and his labourer. There was no racking up of old tenants; no rooting out of old cottiers; no screwing down of servants' or labourers' wages; no cutting off of allowances, either of the beggar at the door or the visitor at the servants' hall; no grabbing at waste candle-ends or musty cheese parings." For the English liked the rich to be splendid, ostentatious and free with their money. It was what,, in their view, the rich were for.2
They liked them, too, to share and excel in their pastimes. "Nothing," the Duke of Wellington declared, "the people of this country like so much as to see their great men take part in their amusements; the aristocracy will commit a great error if ever they fail to mix freely with their neighbours."3 Sport in England was a wonderful
1 Long after, when this kindly tradition was no more and Sir Walter himself in his grave, old. men recalled how the Galashiels weavers, then herded into factories and become embittered radicals, marched yearly with the banners of their craft to Abbotsford for their feast: "the grand days of our town when Scott and Hogg were in their glory and we were a' teal Tories."
2 Bamford, I, 38; Bewick, 31-2, 165, 182; Lamington, 6-7; Creevey, Life and Times, 158^ Charles Dibdin, Songs No. 34, "Nautical Philosophy"; Simond, I, 306.
Stanhope, 87.
solvent of class distinction. Even foxhunting, with all its expense and showy competitiveness, had still something of a rough democracy about it, at once exclusive and classless, of Master and huntsman, groom and whipper-in, dog-stopper and stable boy, meeting day after day on the level of a common love. The coloured prints that depicted its scarlet coats and glossy horses hung in village alehouses as well as manor houses; when the Manchester weavers, true to their country past and oblivious of their proletarian future, went out hunting on the Cheshire Hills, Sam Stott, the huntsman, used to treat them to a warm ale and ginger.1 On the cricket field too, the conventions of rank were forgotten; the best man was "the hardiest swipe, the most active field, the stoutest bowler." "Who that has been at Eton," asked the author of the English Spy, "has not repeatedly heard Jem Powell in terms of exultation cry, 'Only see me liver this here ball, my young master'?" The game was played by the Prince Regent—before he let down his belly—on his ground at Brighton, by the aristocracy who liked to gamble over it, and by the young farmers and labourers of almost every south country village. At East Burnham, until the Sabbatarians stopped it, the common every Sunday afternoon "presented a lively and pleasing aspect, dotted with parties of cheerful lookers-on, with many women, children and old persons." Mary Mitford from her Berkshire cottage window could see two sets of cricketers, one of young men surrounded by spectators, standing, sitting or stretched on the grass, all taking a delighted interest in the game, and the other a merry group of little boys, shouting, leaping and enjoying themselves to their hearts' content.2
For the English, as Hazlitt said, were a sort of grown children. They loved Punch and Judy and games like skittles and shove-halfpenny, leap frog, blind man's buff, hunt-the-slipper, hot cockles and snapdragon. When Nelson went round the Victory s gun-decks before Trafalgar, the men were jumping over one another's heads to amuse themselves until they were near enough to fire."Cudgel-playing, quarterstaff, bull and badger-baiting, cockfighting," Hazlitt wrote, "are almost the peculiar diversions of this island.. . . There is no place where trap-ball, fives, prison-base, football, quoits, bowls
1 Bamford, I, 189. See Hazlitt, "Merry England," New Monthly Magazine, Dec, 1825; Osbaldeston, 32.
2Mitford, Our Village, 18; Assheton Smith, 21; English Spy, I, 28, 72; Grote, 45; Old Oak, 132-43; Sea-Bathing Places, 120.
are better understood or more successfully practised, and the very names of a cricket bat and ball make English fingers tingle." Nothing would deflect them from their sport; when "Long Robinson," the cricketer, had two of his fingers struck off, he had a screw fastened to one hand to hold the bat and with the other still sent the ball thundering against the boards that bounded old Lord's Cricket-ground.1
They liked, and honoured above all, what they called "game, bone and blood." It was because their rulers possessed these qualities that, despite all their unimaginativeness and selfishness, they had so little difficulty in ruling them. It is this that makes so much of the economic interpretation of the time seem a little unreal; one is left at times with the impression that the people of Regency England had never seen a horse, snared a rabbit or set a dog to a badger or sack of rats. Most Englishmen were far more interested in dog-fighting, coursing, hunting, vermin, fishing and fowling, boxing and wrestling, than in the pursuit of equality or the class war. The man of the age was not the Benthamite-philosopher, the radical martyr or the wage-hungry cotton spinner—however important in retrospect— but the sporting type. "Jem Flowers," the Eton boys sang of a local cad,
"baits a badger well
For a bullhank or a tyke, sir,
And as an out-and-out bred swell
Was never seen his like, sir!"
The national norm was "Joey" of the Westminster cockpit—"a small man of about five feet high with a very sharp countenance and dressed in a brown jockey coat and top boots"—to whom Francis Ardry introduced the future author of Lavengro. After trying to sell the "green one" a dog, this gentleman expatiated on the future of society.
"A time will come, and that speedily, when folks will give up everything else and follow dog-fighting." "Do you think so?"
"Think so? Let me ask what there is that a man wouldn't give up for it?"
1 W. Hazlitt, "Merry England," New English Monthly, Dec, 1825; Bamford, I, 108; Eland, 19-23; English Spy, II, 332-3; Life in London, 27-8, 145, 180; Haydon, Table Talk; Howitt, 495; Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, 522-44; Real Life in London, I, 81; II, 108 n.
"Why . . . there's religion."
"Religion! How you talk. Why, there's myself, bred and born an Independent, and intended to be a preacher, didn't I give up religion
for dog-fighting Religion! Why the parsons themselves come to
my pit, and I have now a letter from one of them asking me to send him a dog."
"Well, then, politics."
"Politics! Why, the gemmen in the House would leave Pitt himself, if he were alive, to come to my pit. There were three of the best of them here to-night, all great horators. Get on with you, what comes next?"
"Why, there's learning and letters."
"Pretty things, truly, to keep people from dog-fighting! Why, there's the young gentlemen from the Abbey School comes here in shoals, leaving books, letters and masters too. To tell you the truth, I rather wish they would mind their letters, for a more precious set of young blackguards I never seed. ..."
"You show by your own conduct that there are other things worth following besides dog-fighting. You practise rat-catching and badger-baiting as well. . . ."
"Your friend here might call you a new one! When I talks of dog-fighting, I of course means rat-catching and badger-baiting, ay, and bull-baiting, too, just as when I speaks religiously, when I says one,
I means not one but three."1
One common denominator in particular linked Englishmen of all classes—the horse. The first goal of every boy or girl visiting the metropolis was Astley's circus. The friend who called Charles Lamb the only man in the country who had never worn boots or sat in a saddle, was only slightly exaggerating. Not that all Englishmen rode well; it was remarked of Wellington, though unfairly, that no conqueror ever combined more victories with more falls. Yet almost every Englishman born within sight of a highroad or a field thought it the height of felicity to be "well mounted on a spunky horse who would be well in front." The English loved horses. O'Kelly, owner of Eclipse, declared that all Bedford Level could not buy him. "When you have got such a horse to be proud of," the ostler told
1 Lavengro, 212-13.
the Romany Rye, "wherever you go, swear there a'n't another to match it in the country, and if anybody gives you the he, take him by the nose and tweak it off, just as you would do if anybody were to speak ill of your lady!"1
"Something slap," a "bit of blood," "an elegant tit," were the phrases with which the English expressed this love. A smart or "spanking" turn-out was, more than anything else, the symbol of national pride; there was no comparison, a visitor to Paris in 1815 reckoned, between French and English equipages; neatness, beauty, finish, lightness, quality, all were on the side of the islanders. "The exercise which I do dearly love," wrote Mary Mitford, "is to be whirled along fast, fast, fast by a blood-horse in a gig." During the first years of the nineteenth century the great coachbuilders of London and the provincial capitals turned out a wonderful succession of equipages, perfectly adapted for their purposes, from the fashionable landau and deep-hung, capacious barouche to the dashing curricule, tilbury, buggy and gig, and the phaeton "highflyer" with its towering wheels and yellow wings. The most wonderful of all were the mail-coaches built for speed on the new metalled highways, with their blood-horses, bright brass harness, blazoned colours, horn-blowing guards and coachmen with squared shoulders, vast capes, multiple coats and nosegays.2 Young aristocrats prided themselves on mastering the accomplishments of the professional knights of the road, even to filing and spitting through their teeth; to handle the "ribbons" and be a first-rate "fiddler" was passport to any company.
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