The Age of Elegance (43 page)

Because of these things men respected learning and culture; they had not yet come to associate them with the superior privileges of an alien class. In the fly-leaf of old volumes treasured in farm and cottages, the famihar words could be seen:

"Unto this truth I set my hand:

Learning is better than house or land;

When house has gone and money's spent,

Then learning is most excellent."

Poor children of parts committed Shakespeare and Milton to memory, not because they wanted to better themselves but because the literature of their native land was a heritage for their sharing. Young Thomas Cooper, inspired by the story of how Samuel Lee, the Hebrew scholar, had taught himself the classics when a carpenter's apprentice, learnt Ruddiman's
Latin Rudiments
by
heart in his scanty leisure hours and, too poor to afford a fire, sat up on winter nights wrapped in his mother's scarlet cloak, spelling out Caesar's
Commentaries.
The rough, unlettered gaoler
at
Horse-monger Lane treated Leigh Hunt with new respect when he found a Greek Pindar among his books; Keats's landlady at Carisbrooke had an engraved head of Shakespeare in the lodging-house passage, which, finding he was a poet, she let him hang in his room and afterwards gave him. In his native Scotland Walter Scott was treated by rich and poor alike as a prince; even in London a workman stopped Charles Lamb in the street and, begging his pardon, asked him if he would like to see the great novelist crossing the road.

The wonderful accumulated wealth of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England had been made by generations of hereditary craftsmen, who, though of humble status, were culturally the equals of those who employed them. It was still natural for English artisans to admire the best: to distinguish civilisation from barbarism. It was no coincidence that both the artisan radical leaders, to whose autobiographies we owe much of our knowledge of working-class outlook in the period immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution, acquired early a love and knowledge of engravings. Natural good taste was widespread; Farington, the academician, staying in Norwich in 1
8
12
was introduced to a house painter and a coach maker who were connoisseurs of the arts; the former, he thought, was more genuinely devoted to pictures than anyone he had ever met.

Constable's friend, the rector of Osmington, calling on a poor curate in a remote mud village on the Dorset coast found on the bare walls a coloured print of Stothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims" which its owner little less than worshipped. Even beggars were sometimes men of taste; Stephen Denning, the portrait painter who became curator of the Dulwich Art Gallery, began life in the gutter, picking up his craft from a colourer of prints to whom he had been apprenticed.

Compulsory state education at that time would have then seemed to Englishmen an intolerable invasion of private liberty. But a miscellaneous network of ancient Latin schools, charitable foundations, private academies, dames' and Sunday schools, however erratically staffed, and of monitorial schools which relied on the national passion for self-help and utilised pupils as teachers, afforded an avenue of advancement for genius and a means of maintaining a general level of culture. At Manchester Grammar School the boys of the English class sought eagerly for promotion to the Latin class, the key to a fuller life and better world; young Borrow learnt Lilly's Latin Grammar by heart in three years. For 6d. a week, or in many cases for nothing at all, a lad who was prepared to help himself could learn to read, write and count, or, if he had the ability, get his feet on the educational ladder.
¹
Based on the twin supports of the classical grammar school and craft apprenticeship, the country's educational system, like most British institutions at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was overgrown with antiquity, haphazard and in urgent need of reform. Yet before it was overlaid by the growth of a new industrial society, it achieved results which have never been surpassed by any other civilisation. In literature it produced, and almost simultaneously, Wordsworth, Blake, Keats, Coleridge, Burns, Scott, Jane Austen, Lamb, Hazlitt, Clare, Hogg, Crabbe and De Quincey; in scholarship Porson, the son of a poor parish clerk and a village shoemaker's daughter who found his way to Eton and Cambridge; in medicine and science Humphry Davy, Faraday, a blacksmith's son, and John Dalton, a weaver's. In the arts it produced Constable, and Turner—a barber's son—Girtin and

¹
Bamford, I,
44, 80-9;
Cooper,
5-7, 13-15, 32-5, 45-7, 55-6
1, 72-6;
Farington, VIII,
81;
Grote,
23-4;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
I,
60-1;
Lamb,
Essays ofElia,
Christ's Hospital;
Lavengro,
38-9;
Lucas, I,
31-2, 37;
Ackermann,
Microcosm,
I,
69;
Mitford,
Our Village,
7,
67-8;
Simond, II,
57-8, 96, 130-9;
Woodward,
465-8.

Bonington, David Cox, the son of a Birmingham blacksmith who was apprenticed first to a locket-maker and then to a theatrical scene painter, Crome, Chantrey, a village carpenter's son, and Rowland-son; Raeburn, a jeweller's apprentice, Opie, also a carpenter's son, Hoppner, a Whitechapel chorister, and Lawrence, the son of a Wiltshire innkeeper. In the crafts it threw up that wonderful company of country lads who, building on the foundations laid by the great artificer inventors of the eighteenth century, transformed the face not only of Britain but of the entire civilised world. Though there was little social equality in that England, the career was open to the talents.

It was part of the irony of their achievement that so many of these rustic giants who charted the course of mankind's industrial future wanted in youth to become poets. The unspoilt countryside of Britain, its songs and folklore and religion created a natural instinct for poetry. Burns, apart from his genius, was no isolated phenomenon; he sprang from the conditions of his age. So did Hogg and Clare, both peasants, Keats the liveryman's son, Lamb the serving man's, Wordsworth, the petty yeoman's, Blake, the poor artificer. Such a man as Bamford the weaver might lack their literary gifts, but he was cast in the same mould. His description of the midnight meeting in Grislehurst Wood of his friends, Plant the herb-gatherer, and Chim the bird-catcher, on the haunted eve of St. John springs from the natural poetry of a high rural civilisation. So does his account, reminiscent of Keats's delight in the wind in the cornfields, of the vision he saw in May,
1821,
tramping home from prison with his wife across Hathersage moor:

" '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 li
e, 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 withou
t 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. Whe
never 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."