Читать книгу: «Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843», страница 14
OF PRETENDERS TO FASHION
"Their conversation was altogether made up of Shakspeare, taste, high life and the musical glasses."
—Vicar of Wakefield.
We will venture to assert, that in the course of these essays on the aristocracies of London life, we have never attempted to induce any of our readers to believe that there was any cause for him to regret, whatever condition of life it had pleased Providence to place him in, or to suppose, for one moment, that reputable men, though in widely different circumstances, are not equally reputable. We have studiously avoided portraying fashionable life according to the vulgar notions, whether depreciatory or panegyrical. We have shown that that class is not to be taken and treated of as an integral quantity, but to be analyzed as a component body, wherein is much sterling ore and no little dross. We have shown by sufficient examples, that whatever in our eyes makes the world of fashion really respectable, is solely owing to the real worth of its respectable members; and on the contrary, whatever contempt we fling upon the fashionable world, is the result of the misconduct of individuals of that order, prominently contemptible.
Of the former, the example is of infinite value to society, in refining its tone, and giving to social life an unembarrassed ease, which, if not true politeness, is its true substitute; and, of the latter, the mischief done to society is enhanced by the multitude of low people ready to imitate their vices, inanities, and follies.
Pretenders to fashion, who hang upon the outskirts of fashionable society, and whose lives are a perpetual but unavailing struggle to jump above their proper position, are horrid nuisances; and they abound, unfortunately, in London.
In a republic, where practical equality is understood and acted upon, this pretension would be intolerable; in an aristocratic state of society, with social gradations pointedly defined and universally recognized, it is merely ridiculous to the lookers-on; to the pretenders, it is a source of much and deserved misery and isolation.
There are ten thousand varying shades and degrees of this pretension, from the truly fashionable people who hanker after the exclusives, or seventh heaven of high life, down to the courier out of place, who, in a pot-house, retails Debrett by heart, and talks of lords, and dukes, and earls, as of his particular acquaintance, and how and where he met them when on his travels.
The exclusives are a queer set, some of them not by any means people of the best pretensions to lead the ton. Lady L—— and Lady B—— may be very well as patronesses of Almack's; but what do you say to Lady J——, a plebeian, and a licensed dealer in money, keeping her shop by deputy in a lane somewhere behind Cornhill? Almack's, as every body knows who has been there, or who has talked with any observing habitué of the place, contains a great many queer, spurious people, smuggled in somehow by indirect influence, when royal command is not the least effectual: a surprizing number of seedy, poverty-stricken young men, and, in an inverse ratio, women who have any thing more than the clothes they wear: yet, by mere dint of difficulty, by the simple circumstance of making admission to this assembly a matter of closeting, canvassing, balloting, black-balling, and so forth, people of much better fashion than many of the exclusives make it a matter of life and death to have their admission secured. Admission to Almack's is to a young débutante of fashion as great an object as a seat at the Privy Council Board to a flourishing politician: your ton is stamped by it, you are of the exclusive set, and, by virtue of belonging to that set, every other is open to you as a matter of course, when you choose to condescend to visit it. The room in which Almack's balls are held we need not describe, because it has been often described before, and because the doorkeeper, any day you choose to go to Duke Street, St James's, will be too happy to show it you for sixpence; but we will give you in his own words, all the information we could contrive to get from a man of the highest fashion, who is a subscriber.
"Why, I really don't know," said he, "that I have any thing to tell you about Almack's, except that all that the novel-writers say about it is ridiculous nonsense: the lights are good, the refreshments not so good, the music excellent; the women dress well, dance a good deal, and talk but little. There is a good deal of envy, jealousy, and criticism of faces, figures, fortunes, and pretensions: one, or at most two, of the balls in a season are pleasant; the others slow and very dull. The point of the thing seems to be, that people of rank choose to like it because it stamps a set, and low people talk about it because they cannot by any possibility know any thing about it."
Such is Almack's, of which volumes have been spun, of most effete and lamentable trash, to gratify the morbid appetites of the pretenders to fashion.
We must not omit to inform our rural readers, that no conventional rank gives any one in London a patent of privilege in truly fashionable society. An old baronet shall be exclusive, when a young peer shall have no fashionable society at all: a lord is by no means necessarily a man in what the fashionable sets call good society: we have many lords who are not men of fashion, and many men of fashion who are not lords.
Professional peers, whether legal, naval, or military, bishops, judges, and all that class of men who attain by talents, interest, and good fortune, or all, or any of these, a lofty social position, have no more to do with the exclusive or merely fashionable sets than you or I. A man may be a barrister in full practice to-day, an attorney-general to-morrow, a chief-justice the day after with a peerage: yet his wife and daughter visit the same people, and are visited by the same people, that associated with them before. If men of fashion know them, it is because they have business to transact or favours to seek for, or because it is part of their system to keep up a qualified intimacy with all whom they think proper to lift to their own level: but this intimacy is only extended by the man of birth to the man of talent. His family do not become people of fashion until the third or fourth generation: he remains the man of business, the useful, working, practical, brains-carrying man that he was; and his family, if they are wise, seek not to become the familiars of the old aristocracy, and if they are foolish, become the most unfortunate pretenders to fashion. They are too near to be pleasant; and the gulf which people of hereditary fashion place between is impassable, even though they flounder up to their necks in servile mud.
It is the same with baronets, M.P.'s, and all that sort of people. These handles to men's names go down very well in the country, where it is imagined that a baronet or an M.P. is, ex officio, a man of consequence, and that, rank being equal, consequence is also equal. In London, on the contrary, people laugh at the idea of a man pluming himself upon such distinctions without a difference: in town we have baronets of all sorts—the "Heathcotes, and such large-acred men," Sir Watkyn, and the territorial baronetage: then we have the Hanmers, and others of undoubted fashion, to which their patent is the weakest of their claims: then we have the military, naval, and medical baronet: descending, through infinite gradations, we come down to the tallow-chandling, the gin-spinning, the banking, the pastry-cooking baronetage.
What is there, what can there be, in common with these widely severed classes, save that they equally enjoy Sir at the head and Bart. at the tail of their sponsorial and patronymic appellations? Do you think the landed Bart. knows any more of the medical Bart. than that, when he sends for the other to attend his wife, he calls him generally "doctor," and seldom Sir James: or that the military Bart. does not much like the naval Bart.? and do not all these incongruous Barts. shudder at the bare idea of been seen on the same side of the street with a gin-spinning, Patent-British-Genuine-Foreign-Cognac Brandy-making Bart.? and do not each and every one of these Barts. from head to tail, even including the last-mentioned, look down with immeasurable disdain upon the poor Nova Scotia baronets, who move heaven and earth to get permission to wear a string round their necks, and a badge like the learned fraternity of cabmen?
Then as to the magic capitals M.P., which provincial people look upon as embodying in the wearer the concentrated essence of wisdom, eloquence, personal distinction, and social eminence. Who, in a country town, on a market day, has not seen tradesmen cocking their eye, apprentices glowering through the shop front, and ladies subdolously peeping behind the window-shutter to catch a glimpse of the "member for our town," and, having seen him, think they are rather happier then they were before? The greatest fun in the world is to go to a cul-de-sac off a dirty lane near Palace Yard, called Manchester Buildings, a sort of senatorial pigeon-house, where the meaner fry of houseless M.P.'s live, each in his one pair, two pair, three pair, as the case may be, and give a postman's knock at every door in rapid succession. In a twinkling, the "collective wisdom" of Manchester Buildings and the Midland Counties poke out their heads. Cobden appears on the balcony; Muntz glares out of a second floor, like a live bear in a barber's window; Wallace of Greenock comes to the door in a red nightcap; and a long "tail" of the other immortals of a session. You may enjoy the scene as much as you please; but when you hear one or two of the young Irish patriotic "mimbers" floundering from the attics, the wisest course you can take will be incontinently to "mizzle." These men, however, have one redeeming quality—that they live in Manchester Buildings, and don't care who knows it; they are out of fashion, and don't care who are in; they are minding their business, and not hanging at the skirts of people ever ready and willing to kick them off.
Then there are the "dandy" M.P.'s, who ride hack-horses, associate with fashionable actresses, and hang about the clubs. Then there is the chance or accidental M.P., who has been elected he hardly knows how or when, and wonders to find himself in Parliament. Then there is the desperate, adventuring, ear-wigging M.P., whose hope of political existence, and whose very livelihood, depend upon getting or continuing in place. Then there is the legal M.P., with one eye fixed on the Queen's, the other squinting at the Treasury Bench. Then there is the lounging M.P., who is usually the scion of a noble family, and who comes now and then into the House, to stare vacantly about, and go out again. Then there is the military M.P., who finds the House an agreeable lounge, and does not care to join his regiment on foreign service. Then there is the bustling M.P. of business, the M.P. of business without bustle, and the independent country gentleman M.P., who wants nothing for himself or any body else, and who does not care a turnip-top for the whole lot of them.
The aggregate distinction, as a member of Parliament, is totally sunk in London. It is the man, and not the two letters after his name, that any body whose regard is worth the having in the least regard. There are M.P.s never seen beyond the exclusive set, except on a committee of the House, and then they know and speak to nobody save one of themselves. There are other M.P.s that you will find in no society except Tom Spring's or Owen Swift's, at the Horse-shoe in Litchborne Street.
These observations upon baronets and M.P.s may be extended upwards to the peerage, and downwards to the professional, commercial, and all other the better classes. Every man hangs, like a herring, by his own tail; and every class would be distinct and separate, but that the pretenders to fashion, like some equivocal animals in the chain of animated nature, connect these different classes by copying pertinaciously the manners, and studying to adopt the tastes and habits of the class immediately above them.
Of pretenders to fashion, perhaps the most successful in their imitative art are the SHEENIES.—By this term, as used by men of undoubted ton with reference to the class we are about to consider, you are to understand runagate Jews rolling in riches, who profess to love roast pork above all things, who always eat their turkey with sausages, and who have cut their religion for the sake of dangling at the heels of fashionable Christians. These people are "swelling" upon the profits of the last generation in St Mary Axe or Petticoat Lane. The founders of their families have been loan-manufacturers, crimps, receivers of stolen goods, wholesale nigger-dealers, clippers and sweaters, rag-merchants, and the like, and conscientious Israelites; but their children, not having fortitude to abide by their condition, nor right principle to adhere to their sect, come to the west end of the town, and, by right of their money, make unremitting assaults upon the loose fish of fashionable society, who laugh at, and heartily despise them, while they are as ashes in the mouths of the respectable members of the persuasion to which they originally belonged.
HEAVY SWELLS are another very important class of pretenders to fashion, and are divided into civil and military. Professional men, we say it to their honour, seldom affect the heavy swell, because the feeblest glimmerings of that rationality of thinking which results from among the lowest education, preserves them from the folly of the attempt, and, in preserving from folly, saves them from the self-reproaching misery that attends it. Men of education or of common sense, look upon pretension to birth, rank, or any thing else to which they have no legitimate claim, as little more than moral forgery; it it is with them an uttering base coin upon false pretences. It is generally the wives and families of professional men who are afflicted with pretension to fashion, of which we shall give abundant examples when we come to treat of gentility-mongers. But the heavy swell, who is of all classes, from the son and heir of an opulent blacking-maker down to the lieutenant of a marching regiment on half-pay, is utterly destitute of brains, deplorably illiterate, and therefore incapable, by nature and bringing-up, of respecting himself by a modest contented demeanour. He is never so unhappy as when he appears the thing he is—never so completely in his element as when acting the thing he is not, nor can ever be. He spends his life in jumping, like a cat, at shadows on the wall. He has day and night dreams of people, who have not the least idea that such a man is in existence, and he comes in time, by mere dint of thinking of nobody else, to think that he is one of them. He acquaints himself with the titles of lords, as other men do those of books, and then boasts largely of the extent of his acquaintance.
Let us suppose that he is an officer of a hard-fighting, foreign-service, neglected infantry regiment. This, which to a soldier would be an honest pride, is the shame of the Heavy Military Swell. His chief business in life, next to knowing the names and faces of lords, is concealing from you the corps to which he has the dishonour, he thinks, to belong. He talks mightily of the service, of hussars and light dragoons; but when he knows that you know better, when you poke him hard about the young or old buffs, or the dirty half-hundred, he whispers in your ear that "my fellows," as he calls them, are very "fast," and that they are "all known in town, very well known indeed"—a piece of information you will construe in the case of the heavy swell to mean, better known than trusted.
When he is on full pay, the heavy swell is known to the three old women and five desperate daughters who compose good society in country quarters. He affects a patronizing air at small tea-parties, and is wonderfully run after by wretched un-idea'd girls, that is, by ten girls in twelve; he is eternally striving to get upon the "staff," or anyhow to shirk his regimental duty; he is a whelp towards the men under his command, and has a grand idea of spurs, steel scabbards, and flogging; to his superiors he is a spaniel, to his brother officers an intolerable ass; he makes the mess-room a perfect hell with his vanity, puppyism, and senseless bibble-babble.
On leave, or half-pay, he "mounts mustaches," to help the hussar and light-dragoon idea, or to delude the ignorant into a belief that he may possibly belong to the household cavalry. He hangs about doors of military clubs, with a whip in his hand; talks very loud at the "Tiger" or the "Rag and famish," and never has done shouting to the waiter to bring him a "Peerage;" carries the "Red Book" and "Book of Heraldry" in his pocket; sees whence people come, and where they go, and makes them out somehow; in short, he is regarded with a thrill of horror by people of fashion, fast or slow, civil or military.
The Civil Heavy Swell affects fashionable curricles, and enjoys all the consideration a pair of good horses can give. He rides a blood bay in Rotten Row, but rides badly, and is detected by galloping, or some other solecism; his dress and liveries are always overdone, the money shows on every thing about him. He has familiar abbreviations for the names of all the fast men about town; calls this Lord "Jimmy," 'tother Chess, a third Dolly, and thinks he knows them; keeps an expensive mistress, because "Jimmy" and Chess are supposed to do the same, and when he is out of the way, his mistress has some of the fast fellows to supper, at the heavy swell's expense. He settles the point whether claret is to be drank from a jug or black bottle, and retails the merits of a plateau or epergne he saw, when last he dined with a "fellow" in Belgrave Square.
The Foreigneering Heavy Swell has much more spirit, talent, and manner, than the home-grown article; but he is poor in a like ratio, and is therefore obliged to feather his nest by denuding the pigeon tribe of their metallic plumage. He is familiarly known to all the fast fellows, who cut him, however, as soon as they marry, but is not accounted good ton by heads of families. He is liked at the Hells and Clubs, where he has a knack of distinguishing himself without presumption or affectation. He is a dresser by right divine, and dresses ridiculously. The fashionable fellows affect loudly to applaud his taste, and laugh to see the vulgar imitate the foreigneering swell. He is the idol of equivocal women, and condescends to patronize unpresentable gentility-mongers. He is not unhappy at heart, like the indigenous heavy swell, but enjoys his intimacy with the fast fellows, and uses it.
There is an infallible test we should advise you to apply, whenever you are bored to desperation by any of these heavy swells. When he talks of "my friend, the Duke of Bayswater," ask him, in a quiet tone, where he last met the Duchess. If he says Hyde-Park (meaning the Earl of) is an honest good fellow, enquire whether he prefers Lady Mary or Lady Seraphina Serpentine. This drops him like a shot—he can't get over it.
It is a rule in good society that you know the set only when you know the women of that set; however you may work your way among the men, whatever you may do at the Hells and Clubs, goes for nothing—the women stamp you counterfeit or current, and—
"Not to know them, argues yourself unknown."
EYRE'S CABUL
The Military Operations at Cabul, which ended in the Retreat and Destruction of the British Army, January 1842; with a Journal of Imprisonment in Affghanistan. By Lieutenant Vincent Eyre, Bengal Artillery, late Deputy-Commissary of Ordnance at Cabul. London: John Murray.
This is the first connected account that has appeared of the military disasters that befell the British army at Cabul—by far the most signal reverse our arms have ever sustained in Asia. The narrative is full of a deep and painful interest, which becomes more and more intense as we approach the closing catastrophe. The simple detail of the daily occurrences stirs up our strongest feelings of indignation, pity; scorn, admiration, horror, and grief. The tale is told without art, or any attempt at artificial ornament, and in a spirit of manly and gentlemanlike forbearance from angry comment or invective, that is highly creditable to the author, and gives us a very favourable opinion both of his head and of his heart.
That a British army of nearly six thousand fighting men—occupying a position chosen and fortified by our own officers, and having possession, within two miles of this fortified cantonment, of a strong citadel commanding the greater part of the town of Cabul, a small portion only of whose population rose against us at the commencement of the revolt—should not only have made no vigorous effort to crush the insurrection; but that it should ultimately have been driven by an undisciplined Asiatic mob, destitute of artillery, and which never appears to have collected in one place above 10,000 men, to seek safety in a humiliating capitulation, by which it surrendered the greater part of its artillery, military stores, and treasure, and undertook to evacuate the whole country on condition of receiving a safe conduct from the rebel chiefs, on whose faith they placed, and could place, no reliance; and finally, that, of about 4500 armed soldiers and twelve thousand camp-followers, many of whom were also armed, who set out from Cabul, only one man, and he wounded, should have arrived at Jellalabad; is an amount of misfortune so far exceeding every rational anticipation of evil, that we should have been entitled to assume that these unparalleled military disasters arose from a series of unparalleled errors, even if we had not had, as we now have, the authority of Lord Ellenborough for asserting the fact.
But every nation, and more particularly the British nation, is little inclined to pardon the men under whose command any portion of its army or of its navy may have been beaten. Great Britain, reposing entire confidence in the courage of her men, and little accustomed to see them overthrown, is keenly jealous of the reputation of her forces; and, as she is ever prompt to reward military excellence and success, she heaps unmeasured obloquy on those who may have subjected her to the degradation of defeat. When our forces have encountered a reverse, or even when the success has not been commensurate with the hopes that had been indulged; the public mind has ever been prone to condemn the commanders; and wherever there has been reason to believe that errors have been committed which have led to disaster, there has been little disposition to make any allowances for the circumstances of the case, or for the fallibility of man; but, on the contrary, the nation has too often evinced a fierce desire to punish the leaders for the mortification the country has been made to endure.
This feeling may tend to elevate the standard of military character, but it must at the same time preclude the probability of calm or impartial examination, so far as the great body of the nation is concerned; and it is therefore the more obviously incumbent on those who, from a more intimate knowledge of the facts, or from habits of more deliberate investigation, are not carried away by the tide of popular indignation and invective, to weigh the circumstances with conscientious caution, and to await the result of judicial enquiry before they venture to apportion the blame or even to estimate its amount.
"The following notes," says Lieutenant Eyre in his preface, "were penned to relieve the monotony of an Affghan prison, while yet the events which they record continued fresh in my memory. I now give them publicity, in the belief that the information which they contain on the dreadful scenes lately enacted in Affghanistan, though clothed in a homely garb, will scarcely fail to be acceptable to many of my countrymen, both in India and England, who may be ignorant of the chief particulars. The time, from the 2d November 1841, on which day the sudden popular outbreak at Cabul took place, to the 13th January 1842, which witnessed the annihilation of the last small remnant of our unhappy force at Gundamuk, was one continued tragedy. The massacre of Sir Alexander Burnes and his associates,—the loss of our commissariat fort—the defeat of our troops under Brigadier Shelton at Beymaroo—the treacherous assassination of Sir William Macnaghten, our envoy and minister—and lastly, the disastrous retreat and utter destruction of a force consisting of 5000 fighting men and upwards of 12,000 camp-followers,—are events which will assuredly rouse the British Lion from his repose, and excite an indignant spirit of enquiry in every breast. Men will not be satisfied, in this case, with a bare statement of the facts, but they will doubtless require to be made acquainted with the causes which brought about such awful effects. We have lost six entire regiments of infantry, three companies of sappers, a troop of European horse-artillery, half the mountain-train battery, nearly a whole regiment of regular cavalry, and four squadrons of irregular horse, besides a well-stocked magazine, which alone, taking into consideration the cost of transport up to Cabul, may be estimated at nearly a million sterling. From first to last, not less than 104 British officers have fallen: their names will be found in the Appendix. I glance but slightly at the political events of this period, not having been one of the initiated; and I do not pretend to enter into minute particulars with regard to even our military transactions, more especially those not immediately connected with the sad catastrophe which it has been my ill fortune to witness, and whereof I now endeavour to portray the leading features. In these notes I have been careful to state only what I know to be undeniable facts. I have set down nothing on mere hearsay evidence, nor any thing which cannot be attested by living witnesses or by existing documentary evidence. In treating of matters which occurred under my personal observation, it has been difficult to avoid altogether the occasional expression of my own individual opinion: but I hope it will be found that I have made no observations bearing hard on men or measures, that are either uncalled for, or will not stand the test of future investigation."
After the surrender of Dost Mahomed Khan, there remained in Affghanistan no chief who possessed a dominant power or influence that made him formidable to the government of Shah Shoojah, or to his English allies; and the kingdom of Cabul seemed to be gradually, though slowly, subsiding into comparative tranquillity. In the summer of the year 1841, the authority of the sovereign appears to have been acknowledged in almost every part of his dominions. A partial revolt of the Giljyes was speedily suppressed by our troops. The Kohistan, or more correctly, Koohdaman of Cabul, a mountainous tract, inhabited by a warlike people, over whom the authority of the governments of the country had long been imperfect and precarious, had submitted, or had ceased to resist. A detachment from the British force at Kandahar, after defeating Akter Khan, who had been instigated by the Vezeer of Herat to rebel, swept the country of Zemindawer, drove Akter Khan a fugitive to Herat, received the submission of all the chiefs in that part of the kingdom, and secured the persons of such as it was not thought prudent to leave at large in those districts.
The Shah's authority was not believed to be so firmly established, that both Sir William Macnaghten, the British envoy at Cabul, who had recently been appointed governor of Bombay, and Sir Alexander Burnes, on whom the duties of the envoy would have devolved on Sir W. Macnaghten's departure, thought that the time had arrived when the amount of the British force in Affghanistan, which was so heavy a charge upon the revenues of India, might with safety be reduced, and General Sale's brigade was ordered to hold itself in readiness to march to Jellalabad, on its route to India.
Even at this time, however, Major Pottinger, the political agent in Kohistan, including, we presume, the Koohdaman, thought the force at his disposal too small to maintain the tranquillity of the district; and the chiefs of the valley of Nijrow, or Nijrab, a valley of Kohistan Proper, had not only refused to submit, but had harboured the restless and disaffected who had made themselves obnoxious to the Shah's government. But although Major Pottinger had no confidence in the good feelings of the people of his own district to the government, and even seems to have anticipated insurrection, no movement of that description had yet taken place.
Early in September, however, Captain Hay, who was with a small force in the Zoormut valley, situated nearly west from Ghuznee and south from Cabul, having been induced by the representations of Moollah Momin—the collector of the revenues, who was a Barikzye, and a near relation of one of the leaders of the insurrection, in which he afterwards himself took an active part—to move against a fort in which the murderers of Colonel Herring were said to have taken shelter, the inhabitants resisted his demands, and fired upon the troops. His force was found insufficient to reduce it, and he was obliged to retire; a stronger force was therefore sent, on the approach of which the people fled to the hills, and the forts they had evacuated were blown up. This occurrence was not calculated seriously to disturb the confident hopes that were entertained of the permanent tranquillity of the country; but before the force employed upon that expedition had returned to Cabul, a formidable insurrection had broken out in another quarter.
