French and English: Third Paper

X.

ARISTOCRACY IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE.

IN the course of the last article I said that England had been able to pass through a highly convenient intermediate stage, that of an aristocratic republic preserving monarchical appearances, and that France had not been able to do this, because she had not the kind and quality of aristocracy that was necessary for such a work. I said this, but I did not say (what some Englishmen believe) that France has no real aristocracy at all.

On the contrary, I agree with Littré in the belief that the real aristocratic spirit still lives vigorously in France, but only in the aristocracy itself; and I should say that the great difference between England and France in this respect is that what there is of the aristocratic spirit in England is shared by classes outside of the aristocracy, whereas in France very few people have the aristocratic sentiment unless it has been implanted in them by the traditions of an aristocratic house, and cultivated by a training apart from the ordinary training of Frenchmen.

Again, it does not appear that the aristocratic spirit in England, though widely diffused, is of a pure or elevated kind. Perhaps it is for this very reason, perhaps it is just because it is not pure or elevated, that it is so general and so commonly understood. The want of purity and elevation in the English ideal of aristocracy is evident from the undeniable fact that it is now little more than a kind of supreme sanction given to the popular adoration of wealth. From the idea that it is inconvenient for a peer of England to be poor, a farther advance has been made to the idea that a very rich man has a sort of claim to a title ; and when peerages are bestowed on rich obscure men the proceeding is thought so natural as to excite no comment, except, perhaps, from Mr. Labouchere. When, on the other hand, a distinguished man, not exceptionally rich, is made the recipient of a peerage, his promotion is a surprise to the public, unless it is a reward for political services. The Tennyson peerage is a curious example of this. The friends of the Poet Laureate thought it rather a degradation for a man of genius to accept the prize of a lower ambition than that which they had believed to be his, whilst his enemies made quotations from Maud, applicable to new titles and new mansions. If Tennyson had been a successful brewer or banker, nobody would have made a remark; his peerage would not have been considered either above him or below him, but simply the natural English consecration of new riches.

Forty years before the elevation of Tennyson to the English peerage, his contemporary, Victor Hugo, was made a peer of France. It is probable that not a single Frenchman saw anything incongruous in that promotion, or wondered whether the new peer had money enough to support his dignity.

The reader may call to mind a few strong words of Matthew Arnold about the present condition of aristocracy in England : “ Aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly, the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary.”

These evils are due to the transformation of the English aristocracy into a plutocracy, that is not, as in America, a plainly avowed plutocracy, but disguises itself with aristocratic costumes.

The distinction of a true aristocracy is that it is not a plutocracy, but a noble caste, including poor members as well as rich, and having certain ideals which, however foreign they may be to the spirit of the present age, did certainly, in their own time, tend to lift men and women above vulgarity. The most ennobling of those ideals was the notion that money was not the highest object of pursuit. The poor gentleman could be contented with ill-paid service in the army or the church, because he did not serve for money; and it was believed within the caste, rightly or wrongly, that to labor for pecuniary rewards as the main object had a degrading effect upon the mind. The army was a chosen profession, because it was the school of courage, obedience, and self-sacrifice; the church, because it was the school of piety and morality, as well as the home of learning. I know that I am describing a narrow ideal, but most ideals that have had any power in the world have been narrow, and I am anxious to show how in the old aristocratic prejudices there were elements of real nobleness. Those prejudices were hostile to some things that we now value. They were hostile, for example, to the pursuit of the fine arts, but it was from an apprehension, which I now see to have been only too well founded, that in struggling for the acquirement of brilliant manual skill, the student might spend his efforts on a low object. Those prejudices looked doubtfully upon commerce ; it was thought that a gentleman did better not to go into trade, but the reason was because a heavy business ties a man down so much, and leaves him so little leisure for study or society, so little liberty for travel, that it is really somewhat of a misfortune to be fastened to such a business during the best years of youth and manhood. Again, although some men in trade might have good manners because they were gentlemen by nature, it was thought difficult for them to have the best manners, because, instead of living constantly in refined society, they had to be in close contact with the ruder classes. This aristocracy was, in effect, a somewhat narrow and exclusive caste, that knew quite well the value of riches when they came by inheritance, but did not care to sacrifice its peace, its leisure, its dignity, to get possession of them. It goes without saying that some amount of income was always necessary to the aristocratic life, because independence was the very foundation of it: but the real distinction between aristocracy and plutocracy is that aristocracy had an ideal of existence, making grace and refinement possible on limited means, and the respect of mankind enjoyable without ostentatious expenditure, and economy not contemptible or ridiculous; whereas plutocracy is the most massive materialism, casting into the shade all those graces and elegances of life which are not so materially visible as itself.

The reader may remember how Mr. Bagehot, in one of his excellent essays on the British Constitution, defended titles on the ground that they counterbalanced in some degree the power of wealth by setting up something else to be respected, and he even argued that title was a roundabout means of making intelligence respected : —

“Nobility is the symbol of mind. It has the marks from which the mass of men always used to infer mind, and often still infer it. A common clever man who goes into a country place will get no reverence ; but the ‘ old squire ’ will get reverence. Even after he is insolvent, when every one knows that his ruin is but a question of time, he will get five times as much respect from the common peasantry as the newly made rich man who sits beside him. The common peasantry will listen to his nonsense more submissively than to the new man’s sense. An old lord will get infinite reverence. His very existence is so far useful that it awakens the sensation of obedience to a sort of mind.”

This passage contains, I think, a condemnation of the very use of nobility that the author intended to eulogize. If the common peasantry will listen more submissively to the nonsense of an old squire than they will to a new man’s sense, it is hard to see how aristocracy, in this instance, can be really on the side of mind. Again, if the old lord gets infinite reverence, whether he is wise or foolish, it is a mere chance whether the reverence is favorable to the influence of mind or against it. If the old lord is a fool, and there is a wise man in the neighborhood who is not listened to because the lord has the ear of the peasantry, the strength of title is not the candlestick of mind, but its extinguisher.

Frenchmen who write about England usually remark that mind is overshadowed by aristocracy; that mediocrities with titles get more consideration, and are listened to more respectfully, than intelligent men without them. I should say that the exact truth is more as follows. Political celebrity, in England, is quite as strong as title. Any one who has the ear of the House of Commons, however humble his birth, is listened to in the country quite as attentively, quite as respectfully, as a lord. But I think that title certainly overshadows literary and artistic celebrity. Not that this is of any real importance, for literary and artistic celebrity are not in their nature powerful except over a very few, and are always likely to be overshadowed by something more visible and massive. If I were a celebrated writer, I would quite as willingly be overshadowed by an English lord as by an American millionaire, and would accept the shade with perfect contentment in either case. Literature and art, like all noble studies, have their own ample compensations, independently of what may happen to be the popular opinion about them.

If the aristocracies have not done much for the intellectual life, or for art, they have been serviceable in setting up a model of generally refined life, not for people of culture specially, but for all who had means enough to copy it. This is not to be despised. A real aristocracy is a school of refinement and manners, and nations that are destitute of an aristocracy have to look to some fluctuating upper class, less perfectly regulated than aristocracy is by hereditary custom.

Again, a real aristocracy is a school of peace and contentment. In conjunction with its ally, the church, it encourages in every one a spirit of contentment with his lot in life, an acceptance of the lot as a settled thing, which, though it is not favorable to progress, is unquestionably favorable to happiness.

But the best gift of a true aristocracy, such as that which existed in England down to the beginning of the present century, is to establish a claim to respect outside of the preponderance of wealth, and to encourage self-respect in the members of the caste even when they are comparatively poor. In this way it comes to pass that the sentiment of birth is favorable to simplicity of life. The poorer members of the aristocracy often lived with much less self-indulgence in eating and drinking and in dress than is common in the middle class of the present day, whilst their houses were far less luxuriously furnished than our middle-class houses are; and they were not ashamed of practicing in the most open manner a wise economy in many things that would be very difficult and very painful in the present day. I am not writing this from imagination, but from facts that are well known to me. At the close of the eighteenth century a gentleman belonging to one of the old aristocratic families could live on a small income without any false pretension, at least in the country, and yet not be disclassed. At the close of the nineteenth century the position of such a gentleman will be very different.

The transition from aristocracy to plutocracy has been marked, in England, by the increasing contempt for the poor gentleman. I myself have heard a gentleman of very good family called " a beggar ” because he had only six hundred pounds a year, and seen the mention of another excite a smile because he had only twelve hundred. A worse sign is when gentlemen begin to despise themselves for their own poverty. I knew one who thought it absurd and contemptible to be as poor as he was, and yet his private income was as good as the earnings of a fairly successful lawyer. These are signs that the victory of the plutocracy is very nearly accomplished, the proof of its complete victory being the final stage when an aristocracy loses its historical sense, forgets its ancestors, and humbly acquiesces in the pecuniary estimate of itself. It is a bad sign when an ancient European and Christian aristocracy allows itself to be led and patronized by new families of Jewish money-lenders.

Much of the social power of wealth in England, above and beyond its natural power, is due to a kind of sanctity that is attached to it, which comes, it is believed, from the Old Testament. In France wealth is looked upon as an immense convenience; its possessors are lucky, enviable, and also envied. But in England it is more: it is a sort of commission from Divine Providence for the ruling of men, involving great responsibility and a corresponding sense of dignity. The rich man feels that he has been personally selected as a ruler, and that it is wrong to treat his power with levity. In the presence of his poor domestics, he kneels down and thanks God that he is not poor. He has at least this verity on his side : that whether selected by accident or design, the rich surely hold the forces of nature in their hands.

It plutocracy has been the bane of aristocracy in England, and is gradually taking its place by progressive substitution, what are we to say of the decline of aristocracy in France, and of its present notorious impotence to attain the ends that it still avowedly desires?

Unteachableness, rigidity, want of sympathy with the rest of the nation, lack of practical sense, — these are some of the defects that have reduced the French aristocracy to its present miserable plight. Since they allowed themselves to be enslaved by Louis XIV. the nobles have been out of sympathy with the common people, and since the Revolution they have been hostile to them. It would, perhaps, be expecting too much of human nature to hope that an ancient noblesse could forget the rough treatment it received in the first unreasoning outburst of popular vengeance; but it would not have been so dealt with if it had lived less selfishly, and cared for other interests than its own. It had brilliant intelligence, it had charming graces and all the éclat of personal bravery in combination with the rarest degree of polish, yet it lost the due rewards of its admirable superiorities by its unkind scorn of the manant and the roturier. The manant and the roturier avenged themselves rudely when the time came.

Let us be just to the old French aristocracy, if we can. People of the present bourgeoisie, who have preserved in their families some tradition of the way in which the nobles treated them in times past, have told me that they were affable in return for the deference paid to them, and that there existed in those days a very much easier intercourse between classes than we see at the present day. This is likely to be true, as the noble might repay in condescension the submissiveness of his inferiors, and when they became less submissive he would naturally be less condescending; but however affable it may have been, I cannot learn that the noblesse ever did anything to improve the condition of the people. The people have improved their condition wonderfully and immensely, but it has been entirely by their own efforts. To say that the aristocracy were steeped in the basest pleasures is a coarse exaggeration. We cannot, I think, call hunting a base pleasure. The worst that can be said of it is that it is indifferent to animal suffering and a survival from a lower condition of humanity; the best that can be said of it is that it is a corrective of indolence and sloth. Well, hunting was the great occupation of the country nobility, the privilege and the pleasure of their caste. The other pleasure, that finally ruined and overthrew them, was an extreme delight in society, in conversation, a passion for being with crowds of elegant people in drawing-rooms, with an incapacity for solitude and work. The nobility had in time of peace these three occupations, hunting, talking, and going to mass. In the morning they heard mass in the chapel of the château, during the day they hunted, and in the evening they dressed splendidly and talked with charming ladies in the most stately saloons. Out of the hunting season they must sometimes have known the miseries of ennui; but they had games and garden parties, and the daily duty of amusing those amiable ladies. At a moment’s notice they were ready to quit this pleasant life for the hardships of war, and many a fine gentleman lay in his lace and periwig on the battle-fields of Flanders or the Rhine, not to speak of the great internal conflicts that La Rochefoucauld narrates, and that we now have so much difficulty in understanding.¹ Many of them were vicious enough, no doubt; they were fond of pleasure, they were not industrious, and yet we have no evidence that the race had enervated itself by vice. On the contrary, all the evidence shows us a race that enjoyed life with infinite zest and energy, lively and active in the extreme, but living only according to the ideas of a caste, and careless of the suffering multitude by whose toils the caste-life was made possible. The simple fact that the no bles were so ready to travel, in those days when traveling was so full of discomfort and hardship, is excellent evidence in favor of their real energy. It has always seemed to me that no scene so perfectly depicts the old aristocratic life in France as the mass on St. Hubert’s day, when the lords and ladies attended in hunting costume, and the hounds were assembled, and the doors were left open that they might be distant participators in the ceremony. There you have all the interests of lordly life together except war, — the morning mass, the presence of fair ladies in hunting costumes, the dogs and horses ready outside, and the sylvan glades so near.

The life of the great châteaux was repeated in the royal palaces, and the king drew the nobles round him by offering them exactly the same pleasures that they pursued at home, but on an incomparably grander scale, and with the additional magic of the royal style and state. Prepared by all their habits to accept the courtly life, they fell readily into the snare, and were detached more completely than ever from all sympathy with the common people.

Versailles was a temporary and delusive heaven, with a mortal king for its God and his mistresses for interceding angels. The blessed denizens of this excessively artificial paradise were idealists in their own peculiar fashion, their ideal being a courtly life in gardens, palaces, and great royal hunting forests.

The common world is always a disappointment to idealists, and it has been a disappointment to the descendants of these courtiers. The Palace of Versailles has become the place where the National Assembly elects the President of the republic, and the old nobility is represented there by a minority of discontented deputies. All chieftainship seems to have gone away from them. They are neither the leaders nor the masters of the people, neither a directing nor a governing class. They are reduced to mere protest and criticism, whilst the work of government is laboriously carried on by others.

The number of English noblemen who have been loved and trusted by the people would surprise a democrat in France. Where are the French noblemen who have been so loved and trusted ? Where are the French equivalents for Lord Hartington and Lord Spencer? What Frenchman has filled anything like the position of Earl Russell ? Even amongst conservatives, where is the French conservative grandee who has enjoyed half the popular respect that surrounded Edward, Earl of Derby ? The heir to a great dukedom can go down to the English manufacturing towns and speak to the people in as plain and straightforward a manner as if he were one of themselves; he can make them feel that he has not been spoiled by the luxuries of Chatsworth and Hardwicke Hall, but is still a cool and steady English man of business, with a powerful reserve of genuine English independence in his nature. Notwithstanding all the pride and all the frigidity that are attributed by foreigners to the English character; notwithstanding all the vastness of the gulf which, according to the English themselves, is placed in their country between class and class, it is undeniable that some representatives of the upper classes in England know how to cast a bridge over that gulf, and are able to establish a community of sentiment between themselves and their electors, and a common understanding even as to the details of legislation, that are unknown between the French aristocrats and the provincial urban democracies. I leave Paris out of the question, as there it is useless for any one with aristocratic sentiments to ask for the suffrages of the people.

And yet, in spite of its incapacity for leadership in a democratic age, I think the French aristocracy has, on one or two points, preserved more of the purely aristocratic (as distinguished from the plutocratic) sentiment than the British. To become poor, even moderately poor, in England is to lose caste ; to become rich is to acquire caste; and this is the sign that the aristocratic sentiment about ancestry has given place to the plutocratic sentiment about wealth. Those who really belong to the French noblesse are in no danger of losing their birthright of aristocratic consideration for any degree of poverty that does not make a decent appearance impossible, and that does not compel them to engage in some money - earning occupation. The gentry and their descendants have no prejudice against decent aristocratic poverty, but they have the genuine old aristocratic prejudice against work. They despise all wealth that is not inherited, and value only the results of the labors of the dead. Even literature and the fine arts become degrading as soon as they are lucrative,² a sentiment quite opposed to the general modern opinion in France. All the forms of trade are despicable for aristocrats, and when they hear of a family that has been in trade they say, with an air of genteel ignorance about the nature of the business, “ Ils ont vendu quelque chose.” Their manners towards shopkeepers are often unpleasant, and exhibit a degree of morgue that is peculiarly irritating to a French tradesman. They seem to think that because they want something that is the property of the shop-keeper they are his natural superiors and above the usual French forms of civility.³ Sometimes this excessive morgue is liable to make mistakes. A very proud marchioness had gone, with a friend, to make an excursion in a charming place. It began to rain when their servants were producing luncheon, and there was no house within two miles, except a thatched cottage that happened to be close at hand. A man came out of the cottage, and kindly invited the ladies to take shelter and have their luncheon there. The marchioness assumed an air of awful grandeur, and inquired “by what right” the man offered her such an invitation. “ By the right of the owner of the soil. I am Captain de -, eldest son of the Viscount de -, who is the owner of this estate.” The estate was large ; the viscount was a well-known Legitimist personage, representative of one of the oldest families in France ; and the thatched cottage was a shelter erected as a convenience for archæological investigations, close to the site of a GalloRoman mansion.

It is curious that the French aristocracy, which professes such a deep respect for the church, should no longer supply recruits for the clergy. Fewer and fewer of the sons of the noblesse become priests every year, and those who do now become priests shut themselves up in the religious orders, and are of no use for the common work of the parishes, many of which are left empty, in country places, for want of working priests to fill them. It would seem as if it were no longer thought comme il faut to be a parish priest, whilst it may be comme il faut to belong to one of the recognized orders, such as the Marists, the Jesuits, etc. The practical result is that in the country parishes many of the priests are burdened with extra duty, sometimes far from their homes, merely from an insufficient supply of ecclesiastics. This plain fact — which I do not give merely on my own authority, but on that of a French bishop, who deplored it lately in an episcopal charge — is a valuable commentary on that devotion to the church which the French aristocracy still professes, so long as it entails no greater inconvenience than hearing a mass on Sunday morning, which is often early and short. The priests are not recruited from the noblesse, but from the peasantry. There is, consequently, a social severance between the clergy and the aristocracy, though there may be a political alliance. The priest may have patrons in the château, he may have real friends there, but his relations are generally in the farm-houses. The reason lies no deeper than the obvious fact that the duties of a parish priest are irksome and his life is austere. He is confined to one place, without amusements, with society limited to peasants and to the few gentry who happen to be there for a part of the year only; his work is a continual servitude, and it is never done. He is not allowed to marry, and his conduct is watched with the most jealous and unceasing scrutiny. To devote one’s self to such an existence requires not merely the pretense to religious belief, but its reality. That, and that alone, can make a human being happy in a life that is deprived of all worldly pleasures and has no earthly rewards, and that, without faith, would be without an object.

Two proud-looking English ladies entered, and one of them asked to see some bonnets. A great number were shown her, but they invariably failed to please. At length the mistress of the establishment, anxious to gratify her visitor, said she remembered one bonnet that might suit her taste, and had it sought for.

“ Et celui-là, madame, comment le trouvezvous ? ”

“ Tray mal.”

“ Si vous ne trouvez pas ailleurs, madame, un chapeau à votre goût, j’espère que vous reviendrez ici.”

“ Pewteait.”

And her ladyship sailed away in silent and disdainful majesty.

An aristocratic caste may be an institution for which there is no further necessity, it may be a survival that has become useless, but one likes to see it genuine of its kind, even in its latter days. The principle of the French aristocracy is pure, — it is not the principle of a plutocracy; what is less genuine in France is the personnel of which the so-called aristocracy is composed. I said long ago, in Round my House, that the particle “ de,” which is popularly supposed to indicate nobility, was extensively assumed by families belonging really to the bourgeoisie, but I was not fully aware at that time on what a prodigiously extensive scale these usurpations have been made. Here is a single example. A public functionary, whose duties required frequent reference to registers in a particular locality, told me that he had at first been embarrassed by the changes of name in certain families. Plain names of the bourgeoisie had been laid aside for territorial designations with the “ de ” before them, and it was difficult at first sight to understand and remember these transformations. Having a curious and investigating disposition, the functionary amused himself by tracing out as many of these cases as he could discover, and he told me that in a single neighborhood he had found no less than fifty families who had raised themselves into what is considered to be the noble caste by the addition of the “ de.” Amidst such an influx of new recruits the authentic old nobility is, in these days, completely overwhelmed. There being no strictly kept peerage, as in England, there is nothing authoritative to refer to, and an injurious doubt is cast upon real coronets by the extreme abundance of false ones. Besides the “ de ” the most positive titles are coolly assumed and worn. You may meet with people who live in an old château and are very comme il faut, very simple and well bred, without any appearance of false pretension whatever, yet they have just one little piece of false pretension, — their title. They call themselves count and countess, but are not count and countess at all. Their fortune was made in trade a generation or two since, and the château bought, and the title of the old family that once lived there gradually assumed by a too familiar process.

This is one cause of decadence for the French nobility, — its powerlessness to protect itself against usurpation ; but another cause is the too frequent necessity for intermarrying with the bourgeoisie, for the sake of handsome dowries. Hence the caste is continually liable to deterioration in its social standard, and to the loss of that peculiarly high polish that once distinguished it. In democratic times it may be scarcely safe to say that very high polish must be confined to a caste ; yet how can it ever be maintained except by a small class that specially values it and has a constant care for its preservation ? In democratic ages there are persons naturally refined, but society is not refined. The virtues of a democracy are not delicacy and elegance; they are energy and industry. An aristocracy ought to be elegant, and intolerant of manners that fall short of being the best. Those who know the French aristocracy better than I pretend to do tell me that it is leveling down; that it is becoming more and more like the bourgeoisie both in manners and in style.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton.