The Age of Elegance (48 page)

eyes of flame twinkling in the darkness. As with a sudden flurry of horses each drew up at its destination, the tall liveried footmen leapt down and set up a great rapping on the door. From six to eight, and again from ten till midnight, the noise of the wheels in cobbled May-fair, Simond wrote, was like the fall of Niagara. The houses were lit from top to bottom; the windows from the streets framed a concourse of nodding feathers and stars under chandeliers, while gaping crowds stood at the doors and powdered, gold-laced footmen lined the steps. Every night in the season there were a dozen or more of such assemblies, in which there was seldom any room to sit, no conversation, cards or music, nothing but glittering clothes and jewels and lights, shouting, elbowing, turning and winding from room to room, vacant, famous, smiling or evasive faces, and, at the end of an interval, a slow descent to the hall where the departing guests, waiting in their orders and diamonds for their carriages, spent more time among the footmen than they had spent above with their hosts. "To the Duchess of Gloucester's rout," Cam Hobhouse wrote in his diary, "where was all London, and such a sight as was never seen. The Duke of Wellington and three Lord Mayors there; spent the night hustling to get the Misses Byng and Lady Tavistock to her carriage." Lady Shelley, who was also present, mentioned that she was nearly squeezed to death and that many cried out in alarm: "the Duke of Wellington, who was standing half-way up the stairs, called out to the ladies below that there was not the slightest danger, but the pressure was so great that many of them fainted. More than sixteen hundred persons had been invited to a house which is not capable of holding more than six hundred."
¹

There were breakfast parties in pastoral mansions among the Middlesex meadows and Surrey woods, water parties in carpeted boats with bands and delicately coloured awnings and Gunter's choicest suppers,
fetes champetres
in the gardens of aristocratic palaces, masqued balls and music assemblies and dances where, after endless quadrilles and suppers in which every delicacy was served under Grecian lamps and festoons of exotics, white-gowned, high-bosomed graces relaxed, blushing in the arms of tight-pantalooned

¹
Broughton, II,
98;
Lady Shelley, II,
12.
See also Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
May
31st, 1822; 3rd
July,
1823;
Broughton, II,
15;
Lamington,
19;
Harriet Granville, I,
28, 140-2, 152-4, 164, 205, 210,
II,
80-1;
Gaussen, I,
355;
Gronow, II,
268-9;
Holland,
Journal,
I,
65, 128, 152, 167-8, 173, 256, 332, 364-5;
Leslie,
Constable,
114;
Lieven Letters,
18,112-14, 47-8,125-6;
Life in London,
20-1, 234-46;
Mitford,
Life,
I,
80;
Moore,
Byron,
291;
Paget Brothers,
186-7;
Real Life in London,
II,
148;
Simond, I,
26-8;
II,
250.

cavaliers, in the sensational new German dance, the waltz.
¹
There were parades on summer evenings and Sundays in Rotten Row and Kensington Gardens where, through clouds of dust, hundreds of wonderful horses passed and repassed carrying with them the great world in taffeta, feathers and lace, uniforms, quizzing-glasses and curving top hats. There were musical parties—it was the era of the young Rossini—when gifted young ladies vied over harp and harpsichord with singers "in the public line," and nights at the opera in the Haymarket when Catalini's piercing voice drowned chorus and orchestra and, behind the red curtains of the boxes, all that was most brilliant and luxurious in the world congregated, with jewels, bare shoulders and orders blazing under the light of thousands of candles, while, in the libertarian manner of England, frail ladies plied their trade in the galleries, and footmen, tradesmen and sailors whistled, howled and cracked nuts. There were other nights at the ballet when, as Vestris sang or Angiolini danced, even society forgot for a moment to admire itself:

"While Gay ton bounds before the
enraptured looks

Of hoary marquises and stripling dukes:

Let high-born lechers eye the lively Presle

Twirl her light limbs that spurn the needless veil;

Let Angiolini bare her breast of snow,

Wave the white arm and point the pliant toe;

Collini trill her love-inspiring song,

Strain her fair neck and charm the listening throng."

There were
petits soupers
and gay expeditions to Vauxhall:

"when the long hours of public are past

And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last,"

and
recherche
dinners when Luttrell or Rogers talked, and unforgettable evenings when Moore sang. "It is not singing," wrote Lady Charlotte Bury after- a summer night in 1819, "there is none of the skill of the mere mechanic in the art; it is poetry —the distinct enunciation, the expression, the nationality of his

¹
It was at first considered doubtful whether its shameless embrace was compatible, not only with female decorum, but with chastity: "the breast," wrote Byron, "thus publicly resigned to man In private may resist him if it can."

genius—when heard, delighted in, and never to be forgotten."
¹
Yet, though elegant and cultivated, society could often be stupid and vacant. At a dinner party at Lambton, in a dining-room hung with massive chandeliers and dark-coloured, heavily gold-fringed curtains resembling palls, thirty of the best-born people in England sitting at a long narrow table, the malicious Creevey recorded, ate in such a solemn silence that it might have been the Lambton family vault and the company the male and female Lambtons buried in their best clothes in a sitting position. Usually the conversation of the
haut ton
was of the emptiest kind, and concerned, except for politics, with dress, social precedence and scandal. "Shall I tell you," wrote Creevey from Middleton, "what Lady Jersey is like? She is like one of her numerous gold and silver musical dickey birds that are in all the showrooms of this house. She begins to sing at eleven o'clock and, with the interval of the hour she retires to her cage to rest, she sings till twelve at night without a moment's interruption. She changes her feathers for dinner, and her plumage both morning and evening is the happiest and most beautiful I ever saw. Of the
merits
of her songs I say nothing till we meet." There was, as Jane Austen wrote, a monstrous deal of stupid quizzing and commonplace nonsense talked, but scarcely any wit. What there was of it lacked spontaneity; in the
salons
where the conversation of the rival wits "raged," it was often tedious: famous talkers like Rogers, Luttrell and Sydney Smith spent as much time preparing their
mots
as a fine lady her toilet. Scott, in London for a few weeks, longed to be back at Abbotsford, away from fine company, champagne, turbot and plovers' eggs; it was all very well for a while, he wrote, but it made one feel like a poodle dog compelled to stand for ever on its hind legs. Its conventions, though less tyrannical than those of a German Court, were rigid and oppressive; a young man of talent who aspired to a place in society had to spend half his time leaving cards and paying calls. To settle the precedence of going in to dinner required the tact of an ambassador and the pedantry of a herald.
²

¹
Bury, II,
201-3
· See Austen, II,
140;
Broughton, 1,
94;
Byron,
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers)
Lord Coleridge,
204;
Croker, I,
66;
English Spy,
I,
164;
Gronow, II,
120-3, 297-8;
Laming-ton,
19;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography,
1,
137-8, 142;
Quennell
,prt55i
'm;
Real Life in London,
1,
16,19;
Lady Shelley, I,
64;
II,
58;
Simond, II,
198.

2
"Mrs. Allanson," wrote the Reverend Benjamin Newton, "seemed discomposed at my taking Mrs. Guise out of the room before her, but, as baronets' sons have a degree in the scale of precedence, there can be no doubt but that Mrs. G. ought to precede unless she chose to waive it." Newton,
T41-2.
See also
idem,
215;
Broughton, II,
62, 188;
Creevey Papers,
1,
296;
II,
280;
Greville (Suppl.), I,
18-19;
Lockhart, IV,
181;
V,
370;
Lady Shelley, I,
39-40;
II,
16.

There was a universal sense of straining. "I see her," wrote Harriet Granville—herself a snob of finer, more gossamer texture—of Lady-Shelley, "with a sort of hoisted-up look in her figure, tight satin shoes, a fine, thick plait of hair, bloodshot eyes, parched hps, fine teeth and an expression of conscious accomplishment in her face." The little set who under the dictatorship of the vulgar, haughty, indefatigable beauty, Lady Jersey, managed the dances at Almack's had introduced, Cam Hobhouse thought, something new into English life: a rigid narrow pride as stupid as it was inhuman and uncharitable. "It is not fashionable," wrote the Countess Lieven, "where I am not." Stendhal, who visited London in 1821, found society divided like the rings of a bamboo, every class aping the manners and habits and striving to emulate the expenditure of the class above. The universal desire to get into a higher circle and keep out intruders vitiated it; people did not enter it with the desire of being agreeable but of being on the defensive against those less modish. Fashionable life at all levels was becoming a fearful hierarchy. Lords who kept open house for their county neighbours cut them in London; clubs and even provincial subscription news-rooms black-balled surgeons and estate-agents on the grounds that they did not admit professional men and servants. Gronow described a rich parvenu hostess who excluded from her parties in Portman Square everyone without a title. Strangers entering Stephen's Hotel, the haunt of fashionable officers and men about town, used to be stared out of countenance by the waiters. An English family whom Thomas Campbell met on the Continent, reduced by some accident to the
diligence
and fearful of compromising their dignity, preserved throughout the two days' journey a sullen, timorous silence, never exchanging a word with either their English or French fellow travellers. Good-humoured England was becoming what Borrow called "gentility crazy." "The company are mostly of the superior ranks of society," a guide book assured its readers, "the lower orders of the community not having as yet intruded themselves into Southend." The feeling penetrated the very gaols; at Horsemonger Lane a warder told Leigh Hunt that his prison was not fit for a gentleman, since a person not used to "low people" could not be expected to share their accommodation. Snobbery permeated even the ranks of radical reformers; "Orator" Hunt, staying at a York hotel during the Peterloo trials, sent down a servant to tell a weaver's wife who wa
nted to shake his hand, that he
was not at home. "The same contemptible feeling of classism, the curse of England," wrote Bamford, "existed among the witnesses; there were the 'broad cloth' and the 'narrow cloth' ones, the rich and the poor, and the former seldom sought opportunities for intercommunication with the latter, but rather shunned them."
¹
Even the hunting-field was contaminated. "These hounds please me," wrote the Rev. Benjamin Newton, "as they are attended by gentlemen, not farmers."

Under the influence of this restless competitiveness class feeling was turning into a religion. To seem "genteely connected," to boast a pedigree and titled relations was the supreme aim; "it is to have the crest," wrote Jane Austen after the purchase of a Wedgwood dinner service. Even those whose self-esteem seemed in little need of such buttressing competed furiously for precedence; the owner of S to we, with a dukedom and half Buckinghamshire, christened his son Richard Plantagenet Nugent Bridges Temple. The feudal fuss at times was almost intolerable. When the Duke of Atholl's heir was born at Alnwick—his mother's home—no bells were rung in the castle for a month, the servants were put into list shoes and the Duke of Northumberland forwent his daily exercise for fear of disturbing this precious offspring of two ducal houses.
²
Even clerics treated Debrett like the Bible; an Oxford tutor is alleged to have prefaced a rebuke to a pupil: "The friendship I have for my Lord, your father, my respect for my Lord Bishop, your uncle, and the peculiar situation in which I stand with my Lord God!"

One of the disastrous effects of this epidemic of snobbery was to destroy the unity of the nation's educational system. The grammar schools, which had formerly recruited leaders for Church and State from all ranks, lost their upper-class pupils to those establishments which, abandoning their local connections, took boarders at high fees and became called, with the English genius for illogicality, public schools. They mixed the older aristocracy with the new commercial and professional classes, but segregated both from the

¹
Bamford, II,
204, 247-8.
"It filled the working classes with a fierce contempt and hatred for every one wearing a decent coat." It later explained Karl Marx. See also Ashton, II,
63;
Broughton, II,
186-7;
Bury, II,
108,
Campbell, II,
252-3;
Chancellor,
51;
Creevey, I,
14, 296;
Dino,
110;
Harriet Granville, I,
45, 112;
Gronow, II,
221, 303;
Howitt,
78-80;
Leigh Hunt,
Autobiography
,11,
2;
Lieven Letters,
25-61;
Life in London,
148;
Johnny Newcome,
160;
Newton,
51, 226, 235;
Real Life in London,
I,
245;
Romany Rye,
419;
Sea-Bathing Places,
443-4;
Lady Shelley, I,
37, 308, 359;
II,
39;
Stendhal,
Memoirs of an Egotist,
71.

²
"In short no child except the King of Rome ever excited such a ridiculous commotion as this boy." Mary Mitford,
2nd
April,
1811.
Life,
I,
127.

children of the poor. At the same time the country gentry ceased to send their sons to the university colleges which drew their revenue and scholars from their own shire and sent them instead to colleges where only the rich and titled were welcome. As a result, even though academic reform began to stir the surface of their eighteenth-century sloth, the universities ceased to be what their name implied. They became, instead, finishing schools for a class. "You're a man of family," a college tutor is reported to have said to an idle pupil, "I'm a man of family; call it a literary transaction between two men of fashion!" Bamford thought it symptomatic that high walls were everywhere rising round rich men's gardens in place of the green sod ramparts and hawthorn hedges of friendlier days. Christian England was unconsciously falling a prey to the worst of all heresies: the worship of Lucifer and Mammon. Without birth or money a man was nothing; his only hope was to pretend he possessed them. Haydon, having run short of cash on a journey, flung his last sixpence to the porter at the coach stage so that it rang on the pavement; "unused to such a present for looking after luggage," he related, "he bowed and thanked me so much that all the passengers saw it, and so without sixpence in my pocket I got as much respect all the way home as if I had .£100." A bit of straw on a lady's petticoat, implying that the wearer had been forced to resort to a hackney coach, could set a room of fine people tittering. The effects of this disease were insidious. To be poor, since it was a mark of inferiority, was a matter for shame and to be hidden. It was this that caused Foscolo, the Italian patriot, when he visited England as an exile to write, "The English are a humane people, but will have nothing to do with one who wants bread. . . . Poverty is a disgrace which no merit can wipe off. . . . Indigence would render Homer himself despicable in their eyes."
¹

It was here that the nemesis of the contemporary passion for elegance lay: so admirable when as in the eighteenth century it had arisen spontaneously from a widespread love and craving for beauty, so dangerous when it became an obsession, driving men of all classes to a heartless, competitive extravagance. Like every social virtue it had become vitiated in the end by the faults of human nature and transformed from a blessing into a curse. It was at once the motive

¹
Fraser's Magazine,
XXXI
(1845), 401-2.
See Ashton, II,
458;
Bamford, I,
48;
Broughton,
193-4;
Newton,
72;
Real Life in London,
I,
19;
Haydon,
Life,
II,
35;
Woodward,
465-6, 469.