Chapter VI: Part 6

The great example of this pushfulness is Thackeray’s most delightful creation in “Vanity Fair,” Becky Sharp, though she assuredly was no snob. With all her doubtful antecedents, however, Becky, at least, married into the ranks of the aristocracy; and in her husband our author has created so real a person that one is actually disposed to question whether he was rightly judged by the author of his being. We are told that Rawdon Crawley was stupid, badly educated, unaccustomed to good society, at least when ladies were present. But if he were such an oaf why did his rich aunt Miss Crawley, who had known Sheridan and the wits, make such a fuss about him and make him sit at table with herself and Becky because “we are the only Christians in the county.” Why was he allowed to act in the Charades at Gaunt House on that memorable night of his wife’s triumph? The fact is that Thackeray was obsessed with the idea that all young men of fashion were necessarily stupid. It is a thoroughly middle-class tradition and we find it constantly in his pages. Because of certain mannerisms and affectations, because they cared little for literature, because they fought duels and gambled, all young men about town were not necessarily fools; and it was a mistake to depict Rawdon Crawley as on the one hand uncommonly sharp and also a fool. But it is because Thackeray’s genius has created such a living being that we are indignant at his failure to make him conform to our ideas of what we think he really was. We regard him as a living man whom his creator has misjudged, and not as the figment of the brain of the author.

“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success. Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her dealings with her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant. “She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army of occupation, her success with the men and her popularity with the great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language, only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every description of fashionable life tells the same story and we have to realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”

I must ask you to pardon me if I linger over this theme and try to elaborate it. Becky had had a good deal of experience before her chance came, and she was fit to take it. Her brother-in-law, Pitt Crawley, was always a little smitten by her charm and determined to do the right thing by Rawdon by inviting him and Becky to Queen’s Crawley. Becky strikes the right note at once--they go by coach, “it looks more humble.” Once there, she captivates Lady Jane by affecting interest in her nursery. But these are only the outworks, Lady Jane is kind and soft, Pitt is pompous and easily flattered. But the citadel remained unvanquished in the person of Lady Southdown, Pitt’s mother-in-law. Here we have Thackeray’s counterpart of Lady Caroline de Burgh, a countess of austere evangelical piety, combined with a firm but by no means constant belief in patent medicines and more or less irregular clergy and medical practitioners, who forces her doctrines and her doctorings without mercy upon her dependants and inferiors. “She would order Gaffer Hodge to be converted, as she would order Goody Hicks to take a James’ powder, without appeal, resistance or benefit of clergy.” Our author describes her as “this awful missionary of the Truth,” driving about her estate administering tracts and medicaments.

A lady so domineering, so aristocratic, so virtuous could not be expected to receive poor Becky with her doubtful antecedents and still more questionable conduct. She vows she will leave Queen’s Crawley if ever Mrs. Rawdon sets foot in the home. But Pitt Crawley knows womankind: “She has spent her last dividends, and has nowhere to go. A countess living in an inn is a ruined woman.” This shrewd diagnosis is correct: her ladyship remains and manifests her disapproval of Becky by a stony silence. That astute little woman, however, is not daunted. She reads the countess’s tracts; she is troubled about her soul. Her ladyship cannot resist the temptation of snatching such a brand from the burning. She hopes to convert Becky, who is prepared for a greater sacrifice. She offers her body as well as her soul, and consults Lady Southdown about her health. The victory is won. That night the fearsome form of the great lady appears in night attire at Becky’s bedside and forces her to drink the decoction she has prepared. Her victim swallows it and makes so good a story of the incident that her male friends are convulsed, and thus, “for the first time in her life, Lady Southdown was made amusing.” It is when Mrs. Rawdon Crawley forces her way into the company of the real leaders of London society that we get a true glimpse of the social life of the period, and I shall ask your permission to read the well-known but I think rarely quoted account of her début at the dinner party at Gaunt House. To me, I confess, it seems inimitable. I must, however, remind you of the scenes which lead up to it. First, there is Lord Steyne’s request or rather order to the ladies of his household to call on Becky, which they do, and when his lordship pays her a visit he is amused to find her gloating over the cards they have left. “All women,” he says, “are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth having.... You will go to Gaunt House. It’s not half so nice as here. My wife is as gay as Lady Macbeth and my daughters as cheerful as Regan and Goneril.... And _gare aux femmes_; look out and hold your own! How the women will bully you!” Then there is the interview of Lord Steyne with his wife and daughters. Lady Steyne is told to write and ask Becky to dinner. Lady Gaunt, the eldest son’s wife, says she will not be present. Lady George, the second son’s wife, reminds him of the money she brought into the family--all in vain. Steyne treats them to a vigorous allocution. “You will be pleased to receive her with the utmost cordiality, as you will receive all persons whom I present to this house.... Who is master of it, and what is it? This temple of virtue belongs to me. And if I invite all Newgate and all Bedlam here, by--they shall be welcomed.” The ladies of course yield but they make it hot for their presumptuous little guest.

“It was when the ladies were alone that Becky knew that the tug of war would come. And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own sphere. As they say that persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen: so, assuredly the greatest tyrants over women are women. When poor little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took possession of a table of drawings. When Becky followed them to the table of drawings, they dropped off one by one to the fire again. She tried to speak to the children (of whom she was commonly fond in public places), but master George Gaunt was called away by his mamma; and the stranger was treated with such cruelty finally, that even Lady Steyne pitied her, and went up to speak to the friendless little woman.”

Later on she had her triumph, for when the gentlemen came in they crowded round the piano. “And Mr. Paul Jefferson Jones (an American guest) thought he had made a conquest of Lady Gaunt by going up to her ladyship, and praising her delightful friend’s first-rate singing.” Once Becky had been recognised at Gaunt House, other ladies began to acknowledge her, none the less eagerly because she was known not to be too favourably regarded by the Steyne females. The great Lady Fitz Willis paid her marked attention. When anyone was taken up by this lady, her position was safe. Not that she was amusing or clever or beautiful, “being a faded person of fifty seven”: but nevertheless she was a recognised leader whose social verdict was undisputed. Under her ægis Becky was safe; and it was thrown over our little adventuress because of an early rivalry between Lady Fitz Willis and Lady Steyne. Now the success of Becky with all her disadvantages was not undeserved. She had wit, tact, courage. She could flatter where necessary: but she could defy an enemy when she thought fit. Very great ladies feared her biting sarcasm if they provoked it; and she won her place because of her weapons of defiance as well as her powers of attraction. She fell from her high position because she was found out; but, even after her exposure and Rawdon’s eye-opening to her unfaithfulness to his cause, she fought on in the social battle; and the last glimpse of her is at a charity bazaar!

But the society which Becky Sharp conquered by her brains was soon to be stormed by wealth. And Thackeray describes the process in the novels of a later period. The strife was only beginning in “Vanity Fair.” Lord Steyne’s younger son, we are told, married the daughter of the great banker Lord Helvellyn; but this was exceptional. The city was just beginning to intermarry with the lesser nobility. Miss Schwartz, the rich West Indian, who was destined for young George Osborne, was married into the noble family of McMull. The younger Miss Osborne married, after much haggling over settlements, Frederick Bullock of Hulker Bullock and Co., whose family was allied with the impecunious nobility; but she was completely out of society. She would have gone on her knees to Gaunt House to be asked to dinner there. Her father, whose means would have procured him an entrance into any society a few years later, then lived in an unfashionable part of London, and his dinner parties were dull, pompous gatherings, the most honoured guest being Sir Thomas Coffin, “the hanging judge” for whose benefit the famous tawny port was always produced.

It was about a decade after the Reform Bill of 1832 that the walls of the Jericho of Good Society began to shake at the trumpet sound of wealth. Before we enter upon the subject let me remind you of two marks of the great novelist’s skill, (1) the names he gives his characters and (2) his careful tracing of their pedigrees. The Earl of Dorking lives at Chanteclere, his eldest son is Viscount Rooster, his daughters are the Ladies Adelaide and Hennie Pulleine. Who cannot with a very little knowledge of London conjure up Gaunt House and Great Gaunt Square? The character of the Marquis of Steyne is shown in his numerous titles. He is Viscount Hellborough and Baron Pitchley and Grillsbury, etc., etc. The Crawley family name their sons after the most popular man of the day. So Sir Walpole Crawley was evidently born about 1730, Sir Pitt between 1757 and 1761, the Reverend Bute about 1761, Sir Pitt, the second, after the time younger Pitt rose to power--that is, later than 1784, and Rawdon when Lord Rawdon was the favourite of the Prince of Wales.

The pedigrees, especially of the rising families, are traced very carefully. Do you remember Mr. Foker, the charming young man of fashion in “Pendennis”? His unfailing good humour, his shrewdness, his gaudy garments, his advice to Pendennis, when he was infatuated with Miss Fotheringay, and when he was going the pace at Oxbridge; his love for Miss Amory and his recovery when he found out how heartless she was? Though he plays a minor part, his character is as subtle a delineation as any by this master hand. Now notice how we get this blend of aristocracy and commercialism; for Foker is a true gentleman, honourable, chivalrous, with healthy instincts, yet with a good deal of the man of business in him, for all his idleness and eccentricity a man not easily duped. In the “Virginians” George Warrington, when lately married and very poor, gets to know a Mr. Voelker, a rich, vulgar but kindly brewer, our hero’s grandfather. His father has Anglicised himself and become Mr. Foker whose porter is of world-wide celebrity. He marries an Earl’s daughter and yet insists on the family beverage being served at every meal, and Major Pendennis feels bound to taste it when he dines though the old gentleman found it disagreed with him. In Harry Foker, the young man of pleasure, we have the half-and-half beer and the peerage, and no bad blend either. In Barnes Newcome we have a less attractive type of the same class. The Newcomes are as humble in origin but more pretentious than the Fokers. They do not parade the family business, being bankers; but have discovered a noble ancestry. Their family can be traced back to the “Barber Surgeon of Edward the Confessor.” Thomas Newcome, the second founder, had however to begin as a very intelligent factory hand who left his native Newcome, made a moderate fortune, gallantly returned and married a girl of his own class, and became the father of that prince of gentlemen, Colonel Newcome, whose son Clive, Thackeray wishes us to admire, though I confess I find him insufferable. Then his first wife dies and Thomas flies at higher game. He woos and wins the great heiress, pietist, and philanthropist, Sophia Alethea Hobson, to the amazement of the serious Clapham circle in which she moves. Their twin sons are Sir Brian, who marries Lady Ann Barnes, daughter of the Earl of Kew, whose eldest son is Lord Walham--all neighbouring suburbs of London give the name to this aristocratic family,--and Hobson, a thorough man of business, who marries a lawyer’s daughter, and affects the farmer, whilst his wife professes to admire talent. Hobson is shrewd, Brian pompous, and as the former says of himself, you must get up very early in the morning to take him in. If in Foker we have the attractive side, in Sir Brian Newcome’s eldest son Barnes we have the other aspect of the blending of birth and business. Had Harry Foker sprung from two noble grandfathers, he might have been just as simple-hearted and good-natured as he now appears, like Lord Southdown in “Vanity Fair,” or Ethel Newcome’s lover, Lord Kew; but he would not have been quite so shrewd--for it is no impeachment of a man’s natural good sense that he should have been taken in by the purely imaginary virtues of a Blanche Amory. But in Barnes Newcome we see the mixture of the hardness of a well-bred man of the world and the business ability inherited from a commercial ancestry. I cannot resist quoting at some length the introduction of Barnes to his uncle Col. Newcome at Mrs. Hobson Newcome’s evening party. The description of it is sketched for the Colonel’s benefit, by Frank Honeyman, the popular preacher.

“The Jew with a beard, as you call him, is Herr Von Lungen the eminent haut-boy player.... At the piano, accompanied by Mademoiselle Lebrun, is Signor Mezzocaldo the great barytone from Rome. Professor Quartz and Baron Hammerstein, celebrated geologists from Germany, are talking with their illustrious _confrère_ Sir Robert Craxton, in the door. Do you see that stout gentleman with snuff on his shirt? The eloquent Dr. McGuffog of Edinburgh talking to Dr. Ettore, who lately escaped the Inquisition at Rome in the disguise of a washerwoman, after undergoing the question several times, the rack and the thumbscrew.... That splendid man in the red fez is Kurbash Pasha--another renegade, I deeply lament to say,--a hair-dresser from Marseilles, by name Monsieur Ferchaud--”

But I need not trouble you by reading more. Mrs. Hobson Newcome could not get the aristocracy, so she collected notabilities and felt herself intellectual. As you will remember, the guest of the evening was “Rummum Loll, otherwise his Excellency, otherwise his Highness, ... the chief proprietor of the diamond mines of Golconda, with a claim of three millions and a half upon the East India Company.” The Rummum was the lion of the year and went everywhere, and the whole company was amazed when with the air of the deepest humility he saluted Colonel Newcome, who in his old-fashioned coat and diamond pin was being mistaken for a Moldavian boyar. At this juncture Barnes comes in and makes himself known to his uncle. The art with which the scene is drawn is consummate. Barnes behaves as a thoroughly well-bred man, greets the Colonel with unaffectedly good manners, snubs his aunt by a few quiet words, and finally turns to his uncle to discuss the Rummum. “I know he ain’t a prince any more than I am.” Then Barnes warms to the subject and frankly asks the Colonel to tell him if the bank can trust the Indian magnate. “The young man of business had dropped his drawl or his languor, and was speaking quite goodnaturedly and selfishly. Had you talked for a week, you could not have made him understand the scorn and loathing with which the Colonel regarded him.”

Barnes is of course the villain of the piece: but the interest in his character to us lies in the fact that he reveals in its worst aspect the blending of two types, the aristocratic, with its pride and narrow exclusiveness, and the commercial, with its rapacious selfishness. In many respects the “Newcomes” is a tragedy, as is seen in Colonel Newcome’s quarrel with Barnes and the tale of his ruin in the affair of Rummum Loll’s Bundlecund Bank, and the _motive_ is the struggle for wealth by one of a class whose first object ought to have been honour and to whom money should have been always a secondary consideration.

Let us however turn now to lighter themes. One of Thackeray’s most delightful characters is the old Countess of Kew, the sister of the late Marquis of Steyne and the grandmother of Lord Kew and Ethel Newcome. The old lady frankly, and with a cynicism worthy of her brother, accepts the new order. She marries her daughter, Lady Ann, to Sir Brian Newcome, with complete disregard of the young lady’s preference for her cousin, Tom Poyntz. “Sir Brian Newcome,” she would say, “is one of the most stupid and respectable of men; Ann is clever but has not a grain of common sense. They make a very well-assorted couple. Her flightiness would have driven any man crazy who had an opinion of his own. She would have ruined any poor man of her own rank. As it is I have given her a husband exactly suited to her. He pays the bills, does not see how absurd she is, keeps order in the establishment and checks her follies. She wanted to marry her Cousin, Tom Poyntz, when they were both very young, and proposed to die of a broken heart ... a broken fiddlestick! She would have ruined Tom Poyntz in a year, and has no more idea of the cost of a leg of mutton than I have of Algebra.” Her ladyship was under no delusions as to the antiquity of her husband’s family, the founder of which was a fashionable doctor who had attended George III. She recognised that the great houses to which she belonged had had their day and was resolved to make the best she could out of the world she lived in. She had the brains and the character to make that world thoroughly uncomfortable if it did not bow to her will, and with her the old order began to come to an end. “_Was_ my grandfather a weaver?” asks Ethel Newcome. Her answer is: “How should I know? And what on earth does it matter, my child? Except the Gaunts, the Howards, and one or two more, there is no good blood in England. You are lucky in sharing some of mine. My poor Lord Kew’s grandfather was an apothecary at Hampton Court, and founded the family by giving a dose of rhubarb to Queen Charlotte. As a rule nobody is of good family.”

Leaving the novels, we come to the Book of Snobs, where the storming of society is seen at a later stage. In Chapter VII on “some respectable snobs” we have the rise of the noble family of de Mogyns. The first of this ancient race who appeared above the horizon in these degenerate days was a Mr. Muggins, banker, army contractor, smuggler, and general jobber, lent money to a R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, and by way of payment was made a baronet. His son paid undue attention to Miss Flack at a county ball. Captain Flack, her father, offered the alternative of a duel or marriage, in accordance with the custom of the Irish nation to which he belonged and of the age; young Alured Smith Muggins preferred to marry the lady and on the death of his father became a baronet. The editor of Fluke’s Peerage found him a pedigree. The family was really founded by the patriarch Shem, whose grandson began to draw up its pedigree on a papyrus scroll now in the possession of the family. In the days of Boadicea, Hogyn Mogyn of the hundred beeves aspired to marry that warlike princess. Whether he wooed and also won is not stated, but he married someone and became the ancestor of Mogyn of the golden harp, the black fiend son of Mogyn, ancestor of the princes of Pontydwdlm. These succumbed to the English Kings; but their representative David Gam de Mogins fought bravely at Agincourt and from him Sir Thomas Muggins was descended.

This sounds a mere satire. I turn to Burke’s Peerage 1895. I find that the son of a famous contractor, whose father was celebrated for having begun as a navvy and ended as a millionaire many times over, sprang from a very ancient Norman family which became obscure in 1603 and rose again to fame two centuries later. I notice that a brewer now a baron, whose beer had a world-wide fame, was the scion of a noble house, the first of whom was Gamellus who flourished when Henry Beauclerc ruled the land from 1100 to 1134.

One of the ladies of this famous family was christened by the delightful but unusual name of Temperance, but this was in the reign of Charles I before the brewery was established. Are not such pedigrees as ridiculous as any fiction of the brain? But how much is it to be regretted that the writers of our peerages do not study the Book of Snobs. They would at least avoid parodying it at the order of their ennobled patrons. Disraeli, like Thackeray, exposed this business in his novel “Sybil, or the Two Nations.”

I need not say, however, that it was not because of their descent from the great Hogyn Mogyn that the de Mogyns got into society. They pushed, they schemed, they suffered rebuffs undaunted, and at last they won the coveted reward. Lady de Mogyns cut her friends as she ascended, and at last became a recognised power in the great world.

The day had scarcely dawned when Thackeray died, when instead of wealth’s striving to win a place in society, society sought to obtain the recognition of the very rich. His satire had not to expend itself on aristocrats who hastened to abase themselves before the millionaire, and snobbery changed from a worship of rank to a worship of wealth. Our author has often been criticised for his abuse of the nobility. It has been said that it was prompted by envy. I venture to doubt this. To be as great a satirist as he, a man must feel deeply and have a _saeva indignatio_ against a great evil. This, like all his predecessors, Thackeray had. He saw the hardness that the spirit of his age engendered.

In all Thackeray’s novels and writings we see how ashamed the new aristocracy was of the trades and businesses by which they made their money and how contemptuous the real aristocracy was of ennobled trade. Lord Steyne sneers at the idea of his son’s wife being a banker’s daughter. The Newcomes conveniently forget the weaver from which they sprang. We are sneeringly reminded that Mr. Wenham’s father was a coal merchant; Major Pendennis conveniently forgets that his brother was a mere apothecary. But this was not part of the old tradition of England. A very little time before people of high birth felt no shame in being in trade. The Nelsons are as good a family as any, yet Nelson himself served as a common sailor before the mast, and his near relatives kept shops in small towns. Let me read you a passage from a recently published book on Wordsworth:

“Dorothy Wordsworth ... lived first with her maternal grand-parents, and was not happy with them. She loved an open-air life, and was held closely indoors--serving in fact in a mercer’s shop which they kept.... In 1788 a change came, for she went to live with her uncle at Forncett Rectory near Norwich. The Rector was also a Canon of Windsor, and in the Summer of 1792 ... Dorothy was meeting King George III and his family--the princesses at least ... and going to races and balls.”

Trade was no bar to good society till it was able to buy it and there was a great mingling of classes now rigidly separated. This feeling of shame for having practised some perfectly reputable calling has had I believe very serious results. It has made for the separation of employers and employed. It has caused people to take less pride in integrity and thoroughness and made them desirous of amassing wealth in order to enjoy ease. It has tended to make those of the second generation more desirous to pose as nobles than to follow the calling of their fathers. It has destroyed a commercial aristocracy and has put a plutocracy in its place. It tended for a time to substitute prudery and respectability for real Christianity; and, before the war at least, even these poor substitutes were growing so out of fashion as to be regretted. It has also deepened the rift between classes. Between the old nobility and the poor there was a certain sympathy. The humbler class appreciated the fact that their rulers were gentlemen, they liked their courage, their courtesy, they did not even object to being ordered by them, their very vices were comprehensible. But they have never had any fellow feeling with a plutocracy; with their present pay-masters they have been more impatient than with their former rulers; and the difficulties of the present age are in no small degree due to the snobbery which Thackeray denounced.

LECTURE VIII

SPORT, AND RURAL ENGLAND

I hope you will pardon the flippancy of the subject I am about to introduce; but I may say that it is not possible to understand English life without studying it. Though we are getting close to our own times, yet it is evident that society has undergone an almost complete change since the scenes were depicted in the works I am using to-day. Surtees caught the exact moment when the change was coming; and the old order was awaiting the signal to quit the world. In the rural England of the ‘forties’ and ‘fifties,’ when the railway was just beginning to invade the countryside, the hunting field was still a national playground where neighbours met, the county family still the pivot round which rural life moved. But everywhere are signs of the coming change. The _nouveau riche_ was buying the old estates, and the Jewish magnate beginning to make his appearance; but the fabric of county society remained as yet unshaken. I can myself remember the gulf that parted socially the county from the town, the landed gentry from the professional classes, when the ownership of land was far more important than the possession of wealth.

I propose to treat my subject from two aspects. First I shall take the so-called sporting novels, which are in themselves a literature, though I mean to confine myself practically to a single author; and, after having touched on this subject, I shall ask you to notice how Anthony Trollope, a writer sometimes tedious, but always observant and often witty, deals with the hierarchy, clerical and lay, of county society.

When St. Thomas a Becket was escaping from his enemies in England, he travelled through Flanders in humble disguise. Once, however, he nearly betrayed himself by stopping and admiring a beautiful falcon. Such discrimination raised the suspicion that the traveller was not a mere peasant or itinerant merchant, but an English gentleman of rank. However, the archbishop managed to escape detection and passed on. This little incident, however, shows that, even in the twelfth century, an expert knowledge of sport was deemed to be characteristic of gentility, and Becket, who had spent his early days in the king’s court, instinctively looked with interest on a good bird. Four centuries later a very different archbishop of Canterbury, though he too died a martyr’s death, was known as an excellent rider. Thomas Cranmer, the son of a country squire, was, we are specially told, remarkable for the firm and easy way he sat his horse. Unlike Becket, Cranmer was bred a scholar; but, in later days, he too would have been called a sportsman. About a century later another English primate distinguished himself less creditably in the field. George Abbott, the Puritan predecessor of Laud, was shooting deer; and by pure accident killed a keeper; for which an attempt was made to declare the see of Canterbury canonically vacant. It is much the same with less exalted ecclesiastics. In the middle ages the clergy of England were honourably distinguished for their morality as compared with their continental brethren. Their besetting sin was that nothing could restrain them from hunting. The “hunting” abbot of the middle ages was succeeded by the “hunting parson” of later days. Thackeray’s description of the Rev. Bute Crawley would, _mutatis mutandis_, apply to many an English clergyman, from the earliest times down to our own days.

“A tall, stately, jolly, shovel-hatted man.... You might see his bay mare a score of miles away from the Rectory house whenever there was a dinner party.... He rode to hounds in a pepper-and-salt frock, and was one of the best fishermen in the county.”

It is hardly necessary to dilate upon the sporting vocabulary of Shakespeare; or to point out that the correct use of hunting and shooting and hawking terms was considered as test of a man’s gentility--nor need I appeal to the severity of the old Forest Laws and the more modern Game Laws, both of which were powerless to restrain the English peasants’ inveterate propensity to sport.

Little wonder is it, therefore, that there arose a veritable literature which revolved round the pivot of sport and especially that of hunting.

I need hardly say that the conditions of the pursuit of game changed with the state of the country. In the middle ages the greater part of England was wooded. The greenwood was the home of the outlaw; and it was said that a squirrel could cross England without touching the ground. The chase was therefore pursued in glades and thickets; and could never have been a very rapid affair. What riding was done in the open country was connected with hawking--a very favourite pastime. Gradually, as the country became more open and the forests disappeared, the fox, which our ancestors regarded as vermin, began to be looked upon as a sacred animal, because of the excellent runs he gave. For a long time the hunting was slow and its arrangements very primitive; those who joined in it being the squire, his friends, and his dependants; but gradually the crack riders began to gather from all parts to where the best hunting was to be had; and Leicestershire became the chief centre. Fashionable hunting, as opposed to the rural and purely local sport, seems to have begun at the time of the Regency in the days of the “dandies”; and I have a recollection of an oft-quoted description by “Nimrod” of the way in which a stranger was gradually recognised and welcomed when he came among the hunting fraternity at Melton Mowbray. But it is my intention to speak of a later period when hunting had become a sport in which men, who had no connection with the locality, came down from London to take part. In olden days the town sportsman was a theme of constant derision. John Gilpin’s ride, and Mr. Winkle’s difficulties with his horse, were typical stories. The caricaturists were never tired of depicting the quaint and somewhat dangerous antics of the Londoner with a shotgun, and jokes at his ignorance of all sports were the stock in trade of the humourist. Gradually however these began to fall flat. As the country became accessible, first by good roads, and then by railways, men from London joined in its pastimes, and proved themselves anything but ridiculous where horse and gun were concerned.

“Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour” is valuable for our purpose because it illustrates so many sides of English country life. The hero is a somewhat shady adventurer who spends half the year in hunting and the rest in talking about it, and is famed for being a guest whom, once you get into your house, it is impossible to eject. He hires his hunters, and sells them if he can at a profit; and, as he can ride almost anything, he is able to show a vicious brute to the greatest advantage, sell him for a good sum, and then make a great favour of taking him back. He generally succeeds in getting invitations, partly because he is supposed to be a rich man, and also on account of a rumour, of which, to do him justice, he is unaware, that he is able to give people, anxious for notoriety, a good notice in the newspapers.

One can almost smell the English country in winter time as one reads the book and in imagination plough one’s way, as the dusk draws on, through the muddy lanes on a tired horse after a long run, which has left one several miles from home with the short winter day closing rapidly. Or, one can feel the exhilaration which the sight of a fox gives when he goes away with the hounds at his heels, apparently their certain prey, and then vanishes as he slips through the next fence, not to be caught, if caught at all, for many a long mile.

The author’s description of the different houses visited by Mr. Sponge in his tour gives no bad idea of rural life and sport in the “fifties.” The first house which Mr. Sponge honours is Jawleyford Court, inhabited by Mr. Jawleyford, a gentleman of good lineage, but only moderate means, on which he manages to make an appearance of living in great state. Jawleyford, as his name implies, is a pretentious fellow, apparently hearty and hospitable, but very deceptive to those who come in close contact with him. He poses as a man of culture and refinement, and also as an ardent devotee of the chase. Sponge cares for only one thing on earth, and that is hunting; and he is emphatically a man of one book, namely, a work on London cab fares by a certain Mogg--whether the title is an invention or not, I do not know. When Mr. Sponge has nothing better to do, he takes this work and studies imaginary drives about London, amusing himself by calculating the price of each. One can imagine how this ill-assorted couple--Sponge, who cared for nothing but hunting, and Jawleyford, who liked to pose as a man of culture and refinement--got on together. But Mrs. Jawleyford was impressed with the idea that Sponge was a man of wealth and was a most eligible suitor for one of her pretty daughters. Consequently she received her guest with much hospitality, and gave him a hearty welcome. The first day was unsuitable for hunting; and Sponge had to amuse himself in the house with his host, who conducted him over his picture gallery, and was intensely disgusted when Sponge failed to recognise the bust of Jawleyford, which was considered a speaking likeness.

The next day, however, Sponge, totally disregarding the enchanting Miss Jawleyfords, started, before breakfast, to a meet of the hounds. We are now introduced to a great county magnate, who is believed to be a caricature of a noble sportsman, well known in his day--the Earl of Scamperdale. He had been kept very short by his father, the previous earl; and, as Viscount Hardup, had acquired very penurious habits, which clave to him after his accession to fortune. Hunting was his only expensive taste: and on this he spared no necessary outlay. He was always well mounted and his hounds admirably chosen; but he would do almost anything sooner than take his horses through a turnpike gate. He lived in a sort of back room in his splendid house; and his food was of the coarsest description. His only companion was a Mr. Jack Spraggon, who was exactly like him in appearance, rode well, and was quite content to fare like his lordship, if he could get nothing better. This well-assorted couple between them possessed a fine flow of language, though Lord Scamperdale always said that people presumed on him because he was “a lord and could not swear nor use coarse language”; and they contrived to keep the field fairly select, by driving intruders away by their powers of satire and abuse. Now Sponge was a first-rate horseman, but could only afford mounts which were unsound or vicious. His horse, “Multum in Parvo,” was the latter. In appearance he was a low long-backed beast, splendidly made, and as a rule was a docile and tractable creature; but if he took it into his head to bolt, he did so with great determination and no power on earth could stop him. Directly the horse saw Lord Scamperdale’s hounds, this propensity asserted itself; and he carried his rider into the midst of the pack, scattering them like sheep and maiming several. Then the floodgates of the Earl’s copious vocabulary were opened and poor Sponge was assailed, first by him and, when he sank back exhausted into his saddle, by Jack Spraggon. If I recollect aright, the latter on this or some other occasion called Sponge a “sanctified, putrefied, methodistical, puseyite pig-jobber,” for Surtees is very careful to put no real bad language into the mouth of his characters. From this time forward Lord Scamperdale takes a violent dislike to Sponge and plots with all his might to get rid of him. His determination is increased when on another occasion Sponge’s horse bolts, not this time into the hounds, but into the Earl himself and knocks him off sprawling on the ground. The story, however, is useful to our purpose because it reveals the different types of country life, and the graduated hierarchy of its society. The Earl of Scamperdale is, of course, a caricature; but with all his boorishness and eccentricity, he is quite conscious that, as a nobleman, he is a great personage. His hounds are not a subscription pack, but are supported entirely at his own expense; and his bad language to strangers has at least the advantage of keeping his field small and select for the benefit of the residents in his neighbourhood, who put up with his eccentricities partly because they really regard his rank and position; and also because his lordship shows them the best of sport. Jawleyford, whose daughter Scamperdale ultimately married, represents the country squire, not well off but pretentious, keeping up a sort of pinchbeck dignity, yet a member of the hierarchy of which the peer was also a member, though more highly placed.

Less reputable, but of the same order, is Sir Harry Scattercash, of Non-Such Hall, on whom Sponge inflicts himself after he has been driven out of the Flat Hat hunt, as Lord Scamperdale’s pack was named. Sir Harry is a young man, who has come unexpectedly into his title and estate after marrying an actress; and he is engaged in drinking himself to death and dissipating his money. His house is full of his wife’s theatrical friends, who make themselves thoroughly at home, and Sir Harry has apparently inherited a pack of hounds, managed on a very different system to that adopted by Scamperdale, whose motto is efficiency with economy. Sponge, who, with all his vulgarity, is a first-rate sportsman, takes this motley pack in hand and makes even Sir Harry’s hounds kill their fox in fine style. In fact, on one occasion, when he has outdistanced the mixed field which attended the baronet’s meets, he actually changes foxes with Lord Scamperdale, and a fine scene ensues in which Mr. Spraggon surpasses himself in the variety of his language. Not that two such adventurers as Sponge and Spraggon are real enemies; and they meet on neutral ground in the house of a third type of Squire. Mr. Puffington, the son of a wealthy manufacturer, has bought an estate and set up a pack of hounds. The delineation of this character is extremely clever; and shows how the author realises the change which is coming over country life. Scamperdale, Jawleyford, and Sir Harry all belong to the old landed aristocracy. Puffington is a new man. His money is in the land like theirs; but he is independent of his estate. In his desire to be popular he allows his tenants to rob him and his labourers to poach his game. He maintains a pack of foxhounds, and entertains magnificently. But he is not really liked, and is regarded as an interloper. Thinking Sponge is a literary man and that he will trumpet the fame of his pack in the newspapers, Puffington invites him to stay in his house and entertains him royally.

Jack Spraggon is also one of the invited guests; and Sponge lends him one of his horses. They have a famous run with the hounds; and when they get home, in the interval before dinner, Spraggon tells Sponge that Puffington, their host, expects to have a flaming account of his hunt in the newspapers; and that their reception is due to the fact that Sponge is believed to be a great writer on sporting subjects. As, however, he does not know how to do it, Spraggon offers to dictate an account of the run; and Sponge settles down at the table, having used his friend’s razor to cut the pen. The run is described in true journalistic style; and, when Sponge, who is an indifferent penman, exclaims “Hard work authorship,” Jack Spraggon says that he could go on for ever. Sponge retorts, “It’s all very well for you to do the talking, but it’s the ‘writing’ and the craning and the spelling.” However, the manuscript is sent off to the local paper, and falls into the hands of a daughter of the proprietor. As she cannot make head or tail to Sponge’s writing, she edits it as best she can, calling “a ravishing scent” an exquisite perfume; and making the run not less than ten miles “as the cow goes” instead of as the “crow flies.”

That evening there is a grander banquet than ever; and Spraggon and Sponge get hold of a rich young fellow, a Mr. Pacey. Spraggon persuades Pacey, who fancies himself a very sharp blade indeed, that Sponge is a greenhorn, with the result that at the end of the dinner he buys Sponge’s horse, Multum in Parvo, at a very low figure. As, however, that famous quadruped manages to throw Mr. Pacey, and also his guardian Major Screw, Sponge gets the horse back with a sum of money as a compensation for the inconvenience to which he has been put, and generously gives Mr. Pacey a bit of valuable advice: never to try to trade in horses after dinner! Naturally Mr. Puffington is not pleased by all this, and when he reads the account of the run with his hounds he nearly has a fit; and he resolves to take to his bed till Sponge is well out of his house.

Here we take farewell of our hero; and I will say a few words on the way in which Surtees, in his sketches of country life, indicates his appreciation that a change is coming over the land. The Scamperdales, Jawleyfords, and the older families are disappearing and the new commercial and moneyed class is taking its place. Puffington and men of his type are beginning to come to the front. It is getting more difficult to live on the land, as the older gentry had done; and estates are becoming rather a tax on a commercial fortune than the support of an aristocratic family. Surtees represents the old landowners as somewhat out at elbows, trying in vain to compete with the new men who are buying up their estates. In one of his novels we have a great Jewish magnate, Sir Moses Mainchance, who would have been practically impossible twenty years earlier. Sport changes with society. The railway has made country and town one, as a few hours bring all England within reach of London. Hunting is ceasing to be the old friendly and almost family institution, where the neighbourhood gathered at the meet, and everybody was known and welcomed. It was already becoming an affair for the rich from all parts of the world; and the Scamperdales in vain tried to scare away the wealthy sportsman of the town by abusive language. The time was close at hand when his presence would be welcomed eagerly; and rural sport would be at an end.

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We will now turn to another side of country life--namely, the social as portrayed by Anthony Trollope, who might also have been quoted as a writer on sport. Trollope, to my mind, has a real genius for interesting his readers in uninteresting people; because he describes so faithfully the characters one meets every day, gives their conversation exactly as they talked to one another, and exhibits them in the same commonplace attitude, in which we all are for the greater part of our lives. He wrote not by inspiration, when he felt in the mood, but regularly and systematically, turning out his novels, when he had leisure from his duties as a government official, at so many pages an hour. He says that he had little or no intimate knowledge of cathedral society; yet, to one who has opportunity of observing it somewhat closely, his descriptions appear to have the accuracy of a photograph.

In Trollope’s novels we have English life, especially well drawn; and though many scenes are laid in London, his characters always gravitate back to the country whence they derive their influence and prestige. It is not my intention to elaborate more than one side of this very versatile and copious writer. His political novels, for example, are well worth studying, especially “Phineas Finn.” In “The Bertrams” we have an excellent picture of Oxford life in the opening chapter. Personal experience gave Trollope unusual insight into the characters of the government officials of his time. He was wonderfully quick at seizing on types hitherto unknown in English society who were gradually becoming forces in the world. Even as a writer on sport he deserves a place. For what can be better than his description of the young, popular, able clergyman in “Framley Parsonage,” whose very success leads him into some very difficult situations? I need not remind you, for I find he is widely read in this country, of his treatment of social gatherings in great houses like that of the Duke of Omnium. All I intend to do is to ask you to examine his clerical types and, perhaps, to offer some explanations which may be useful.

The state of things we read of in such books as “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers” has almost, but not quite, disappeared, and I confess that, although I think I understand it, I find a difficulty in making it clear to you. The initial problem is to explain why life in a cathedral city is often rural rather than town life. In the first place the word “city” in England used to be applied only to places where there was a cathedral. Ely, though still a town of some 8000 people, is always spoken of as a “city” and so are Llandaff and St. David’s, which are little more than villages; and, till very recently, Liverpool and Birmingham were styled “towns.” Leicester, with some 300,000 inhabitants, is still, I believe, technically a “town.” The older cathedrals are in fact generally in small places which were once very important “cities,” but have been outstripped by what then were little better than hamlets, but have long since become great centres of population. Such are Canterbury, Chichester, Salisbury, Wells, Ely, and Lichfield. Barchester was emphatically a country town, dominated by the landowners in the vicinity; and the clergy around it were a rural priesthood. The society which was centred in any cathedral was and still is unlike anything else in the world. In the middle ages a great cathedral, like Salisbury or Lincoln, was designed for a semi-monastic rather than congregational worship. It was served by a community of priests, called “canons” because they observed a “canon,” or rule of life. Joined with these was a veritable army of inferior priests, singers and ministers, all under the control of the dean, who presided over the cathedral, as the bishop over the diocese. This vast and splendid establishment was, at the Reformation under Queen Elizabeth, reduced to a limited number of canons, or prebendaries, minor canons, singing men and boys, vergers and bedesmen. As, however, under the new régime the services were little more than daily morning and evening prayer, the reduced staff had little or nothing to do. Accordingly the canons took turns to reside in the cathedral close and usually held benefices in other places. They married like other clergy; but were still, nominally, monastic persons attached to the cathedral. As time went on the estates of the chapters or colleges of the deans and canons became very valuable; and their positions were much coveted as the prizes of the church. A cathedral chapter therefore was, as a rule, an aristocratic body, consisting of the dean nominated by the crown, and the canons, as a rule, by the bishop. Of course the bishops, in days when public opinion was not powerful, put their relatives into the canonries; and there were many ties between the various members of the cathedral bodies, who kept the rest of the world, and especially the inferior clergy, at a respectful distance.

With this attempt to explain the situation let me try to set forth some of the principal characters in “The Warden” and “Barchester Towers”; remembering that men are living under an order of things which was beginning to pass away.