The Book of Snobs Part 7

The host is smiling, and hob-n.o.bbing, and talking up and down the table; but a prey to secret terrors and anxieties, lest the wines he has brought up from the cellar should prove insufficient; lest a corked bottle should destroy his calculations; or our friend the carpet-beater, by making some BEVUE, should disclose his real quality of greengrocer, and show that he is not the family butler.

The hostess is smiling resolutely through all the courses, smiling through her agony; though her heart is in the kitchen, and she is speculating with terror lest there be any disaster there. If the SOUFFLE should collapse, or if Wiggins does not send the ices in time--she feels as if she would commit suicide--that smiling, jolly woman!

The children upstairs are yelling, as their maid is crimping their miserable ringlets with hot tongs, tearing Miss Emmy's hair out by the roots, or scrubbing Miss Polly's dumpy nose with mottled soap till the little wretch screams herself into fits. The young males of the family are employed, as we have stated, in piratical exploits upon the landing-place.

The servants are not servants, but the before-mentioned retail tradesmen.

The plate is not plate, but a mere shiny Birmingham lacquer; and so is the hospitality, and everything else.

The talk is Birmingham talk. The wag of the party, with bitterness in his heart, having just quitted his laundress, who is dunning him for her bill, is firing off good stories; and the opposition wag is furious that he cannot get an innings. Jawkins, the great conversationalist, is scornful and indignant with the pair of them, because he is kept out of court. Young Muscadel, that cheap dandy, is talking Fashion and Almack's out of the MORNING POST, and disgusting his neighbour, Mrs. Fox, who reflects that she has never been there. The widow is vexed out of patience, because her daughter Maria has got a place beside young Cambric, the penniless curate, and not by Colonel Goldmore, the rich widower from India. The Doctor's wife is sulky, because she has not been led out before the barrister's lady; old Doctor Cork is grumbling at the wine, and Guttleton sneering at the cookery.

And to think that all these people might be so happy, and easy, and friendly, were they brought together in a natural unpretentious way, and but for an unhappy pa.s.sion for peac.o.c.ks' feathers in England. Gentle shades of Marat and Robespierre! when I see how all the honesty of society is corrupted among us by the miserable fashion-worship, I feel as angry as Mrs. Fox just mentioned, and ready to order a general BATTUE of peac.o.c.ks.

CHAPTER XXI--SOME CONTINENTAL Sn.o.bS

Now that September has come, and all our Parliamentary duties are over, perhaps no cla.s.s of Sn.o.bs are in such high feather as the Continental Sn.o.bs. I watch these daily as they commence their migrations from the beach at Folkestone. I see shoals of them depart (not perhaps without an innate longing too to quit the Island along with those happy Sn.o.bs).

Farewell, dear friends, I say: you little know that the individual who regards you from the beach is your friend and historiographer and brother.

I went to-day to see our excellent friend Snooks, on board the 'Queen of the French;' many scores of Sn.o.bs were there, on the deck of that fine ship, marching forth in their pride and bravery. They will be at Ostend in four hours; they will inundate the Continent next week; they will carry into far lands the famous image of the British Sn.o.b. I shall not see them--but am with them in spirit: and indeed there is hardly a country in the known and civilized world in which these eyes have not beheld them.

I have seen Sn.o.bs, in pink coats and hunting-boots, scouring over the Campagna of Rome; and have heard their oaths and their well-known slang in the galleries of the Vatican, and under the shadowy arches of the Colosseum. I have met a Sn.o.b on a dromedary in the desert, and picnicking under the Pyramid of Cheops. I like to think how many gallant British Sn.o.bs there are, at this minute of writing, pushing their heads out of every window in the courtyard of 'Meurice's' in the Rue de Rivoli; or roaring out, 'Garsong, du pang,' 'Garsong, du Yang;' or swaggering down the Toledo at Naples; or even how many will be on the look-out for Snooks on Ostend Pier,--for Snooks, and the rest of the Sn.o.bs on board the 'Queen of the French.'

Look at the Marquis of Carabas and his two carriages. My Lady Marchioness comes on board, looks round with that happy air of mingled terror and impertinence which distinguishes her ladyship, and rushes to her carriage, for it is impossible that she should mingle with the other Sn.o.bs on deck. There she sits, and will be ill in private. The strawberry leaves on her chariot-panels are engraved on her ladyship's heart. If she were going to heaven instead of to Ostend, I rather think she would expect to have DES PLACES RESERVEES for her, and would send to order the best rooms. A courier, with his money-bag of office round his shoulders--a huge scowling footman, whose dark pepper-and-salt livery glistens with the heraldic insignia of the Carabases--a brazen-looking, tawdry French FEMME-DE-CHAMBRE (none but a female pen can do justice to that wonderful tawdry toilette of the lady's-maid EN VOYAGE)--and a miserable DAME DE COMPAGNIE, are ministering to the wants of her ladyship and her King Charles's spaniel. They are rushing to and fro with eau-de-Cologne, pocket-handkerchiefs, which are all fringe and cipher, and popping mysterious cushions behind and before, and in every available corner of the carriage.

The little Marquis, her husband is walking about the deck in a bewildered manner, with a lean daughter on each arm: the carroty-tufted hope of the family is already smoking on the foredeck in a travelling costume checked all over, and in little lacquer-tip pod jean boots, and a shirt embroidered with pink boa-constrictors. 'What is it that gives travelling Sn.o.bs such a marvellous propensity to rush into a costume?

Why should a man not travel in a coat, &c.? but think proper to dress himself like a harlequin in mourning? See, even young Aldermanbury, the tallow-merchant, who has just stepped on board, has got a travelling-dress gaping all over with pockets; and little Tom Tapeworm, the lawyer's clerk out of the City, who has but three weeks' leave, turns out in gaiters and a bran-new shooting-jacket, and must let the moustaches grow on his little sniffy upper lip, forsooth!

Pompey Hicks is giving elaborate directions to his servant, and asking loudly, 'Davis, where's the dwessing-case?' and 'Davis, you'd best take the pistol-case into the cabin.' Little Pompey travels with a dressing-case, and without a beard: whom he is going to shoot with his pistols, who on earth can tell? and what he is to do with his servant but wait upon him, I am at a loss to conjecture.

Look at honest Nathan Houndsditch and his lady, and their little son.

What a n.o.ble air of blazing contentment illuminates the features of those Sn.o.bs of Eastern race! What a toilette Houndsditch's is! What rings and chains, what gold-headed canes and diamonds, what a tuft the rogue has got to his chin (the rogue! he will never spare himself any cheap enjoyment!) Little Houndsditch has a little cane with a gilt head and little mosaic ornaments--altogether an extra air. As for the lady, she is all the colours of the rainbow! she has a pink parasol, with a white lining, and a yellow bonnet, and an emerald green shawl, and a shot-silk pelisse; and drab boots and rhubarb-coloured gloves; and parti-coloured gla.s.s b.u.t.tons, expanding from the size of a fourpenny-piece to a crown, glitter and twiddle all down the front of her gorgeous costume. I have said before, I like to look at 'the Peoples' on their gala days, they are so picturesquely and outrageously splendid and happy.

Yonder comes Captain Bull; spick and span, tight and trim; who travels for four or six months every year of his life; who does not commit himself by luxury of raiment or insolence of demeanour, but I think is as great a Sn.o.b as any man on board. Bull pa.s.ses the season in London, sponging for dinners, and sleeping in a garret near his Club. Abroad, he has been everywhere; he knows the best wine at every inn in every capital in Europe; lives with the best English company there; has seen every palace and picture-gallery from Madrid to Stockholm; speaks an abominable little jargon of half-a-dozen languages--and knows nothing--nothing. Bull hunts tufts on the Continent, and is a sort of amateur courier. He will sc.r.a.pe acquaintance with old Carabas before they make Ostend; and will remind his lordship that he met him at Vienna twenty years ago, or gave him a gla.s.s of Schnapps up the Righi. We have said Bull knows nothing: he knows the birth, arms, and pedigree of all the peerage, has poked his little eyes into every one of the carriages on board--their panels noted and their crests surveyed; he knows all the Continental stories of English scandal--how Count Towrowski ran off with Miss Baggs at Naples--how VERY thick Lady Smigsmag was with young Cornichon of the French Legation at Florence--the exact amount which Jack Deuceace won of Bob Greengoose at Baden--what it is that made the Staggs settle on the Continent: the sum for which the O'Goggarty estates are mortgaged, &c. If he can't catch a lord he will hook on to a baronet, or else the old wretch will catch hold of some beardless young stripling of fashion, and show him 'life' in various and amiable and inaccessible quarters. Faugh! the old brute! If he has every one of the vices of the most boisterous youth, at least he is comforted by having no conscience. He is utterly stupid, but of a jovial turn, He believes himself to be quite a respectable member of society: but perhaps the only good action he ever did in his life is the involuntary one of giving an example to be avoided, and showing what an odious thing in the social picture is that figure of the debauched old man who pa.s.ses through life rather a decorous Silenus, and dies some day in his garret, alone, unrepenting, and unnoted, save by his astonished heirs, who find that the dissolute old miser has left money behind him. See! he is up to old Carabas already! I told you he would.

Yonder you see the old Lady Mary MacScrew, and those middle-aged young women her daughters; they are going to cheapen and haggle in Belgium and up the Rhine until they meet with a boarding-house where they can live upon less board-wages than her ladyship pays her footmen. But she will exact and receive considerable respect from the British Sn.o.bs located in the watering place which she selects for her summer residence, being the daughter of the Earl of Haggistoun. That broad-shouldered buck, with the great whiskers and the cleaned white kid-gloves, is Mr. Phelim Clancy of Poldoodystown: he calls himself Mr. De Clancy; he endeavours to disguise his native brogue with the richest superposition of English; and if you play at billiards or ECARTE with him, the chances are that you will win the first game, and he the seven or eight games ensuing.

That overgrown lady with the four daughters, and the young dandy from the University, her son, is Mrs. Kewsy, the eminent barrister's lady, who would rather die than not be in the fashion. She has the 'Peerage'

in her carpet-bag, you may be sure; but she is altogether cut out by Mrs. Quod, the attorney's wife, whose carriage, with the apparatus of rumbles, d.i.c.keys, and imperials, scarcely yields in splendour to the Marquis of Carabas's own travelling-chariot, and whose courier has even bigger whiskers and a larger morocco money-bag than the Marquis's own travelling gentleman. Remark her well: she is talking to Mr. Spout, the new Member for Jawborough, who is going out to inspect the operations of the Zollverein, and will put some very severe questions to Lord Palmerston next session upon England and her relations with the Prussian-blue trade, the Naples-soap trade, the German-tinder trade, &c.

Spout will patronize King Leopold at Brussels; will write letters from abroad to the JAWBOROUGH INDEPENDENT; and in his quality of MEMBER DU PARLIAMONG BRITANNIQUE, will expect to be invited to a family dinner with every sovereign whose dominions he honours with a visit during his tour.

The next person is--but hark! the bell for sh.o.r.e is ringing, and, shaking Snook's hand cordially, we rush on to the pier, waving him a farewell as the n.o.ble black ship cuts keenly through the sunny azure waters, bearing away that cargo of Sn.o.bs outward bound.

CHAPTER XXII--CONTINENTAL Sn.o.bBERY CONTINUED

We are accustomed to laugh at the French for their braggadocio propensities, and intolerable vanity about La France, la gloire, l'Empereur, and the like; and yet I think in my heart that the British Sn.o.b, for conceit and self-sufficiency and braggartism in his way, is without a parallel. There is always something uneasy in a Frenchman's conceit. He brags with so much fury, shrieking, and gesticulation; yells out so loudly that the Francais is at the head of civilization, the centre of thought, &c.; that one can't but see the poor fellow has a lurking doubt in his own mind that he is not the wonder he professes to be.

About the British Sn.o.b, on the contrary, there is commonly no noise, no bl.u.s.ter, but the calmness of profound conviction. We are better than all the world; we don't question the opinion at all; it's an axiom. And when a Frenchman bellows out, 'LA FRANCE, MONSIEUR, LA FRANCE EST A LA TETE DU MONDE CIVILISE!' we laugh good-naturedly at the frantic poor devil.

WE are the first chop of the world: we know the fact so well in our secret hearts that a claim set up elsewhere is simply ludicrous. My dear brother reader, say, as a man of honour, if you are not of this opinion?

Do you think a Frenchman your equal? You don't--you gallant British Sn.o.b--you know you don't: no more, perhaps, does the Sn.o.b your humble servant, brother.

And I am inclined to think it is this conviction, and the consequent bearing of the Englishman towards the foreigner whom he condescends to visit, this confidence of superiority which holds up the head of the owner of every English hat-box from Sicily to St. Petersburg, that makes us so magnificently hated throughout Europe as we are; this--more than all our little victories, and of which many Frenchmen and Spaniards have never heard--this amazing and indomitable insular pride, which animates my lord in his travelling-carriage as well as John in the rumble.

If you read the old Chronicles of the French wars, you find precisely the same character of the Englishman, and Henry V.'s people behaved with just the cool domineering manner of our gallant veterans of France and the Peninsula. Did you never hear Colonel Cutler and Major Slasher talking over the war after dinner? or Captain Boarder describing his action with the 'Indomptable?' 'Hang the fellows,' says Boarder, 'their practice was very good. I was beat off three times before I took her.'

'Cuss those carabineers of Milhaud's,' says Slasher, 'what work they made of our light cavalry!' implying a sort of surprise that the Frenchman should stand up against Britons at all: a good-natured wonder that the blind, mad, vain-glorious, brave poor devils should actually have the courage to resist an Englishman. Legions of such Englishmen are patronizing Europe at this moment, being kind to the Pope, or good-natured to the King of Holland, or condescending to inspect the Prussian reviews. When Nicholas came here, who reviews a quarter of a million of pairs of moustaches to his breakfast every morning, we took him off to Windsor and showed him two whole regiments of six or eight hundred Britons a-piece, with an air as much as to say,--'There, my boy, look at THAT. Those are ENGLISHMEN, those are, and your master whenever you please,' as the nursery song says. The British Sn.o.b is long, long past scepticism, and can afford to laugh quite good-humouredly at those conceited Yankees, or besotted little Frenchmen, who set up as models of mankind. THEY forsooth!

I have been led into these remarks by listening to an old fellow at the Hotel du Nord, at Boulogne, and who is evidently of the Slasher sort. He came down and seated himself at the breakfast-table, with a surly scowl on his salmon-coloured bloodshot face, strangling in a tight, cross-barred cravat; his linen and his appointments so perfectly stiff and spotless that everybody at once recognized him as a dear countryman.

Only our port-wine and other admirable inst.i.tutions could have produced a figure so insolent, so stupid, so gentleman-like. After a while our attention was called to him by his roaring out, in a voice of plethoric fury, 'O!'

Everybody turned round at the 'O,' conceiving the Colonel to be, as his countenance denoted him, in intense pain; but the waiters knew better, and instead of being alarmed, brought the Colonel the kettle. 'O,' it appears, is the French for hot-water. The Colonel (though he despises it heartily) thinks he speaks the language remarkably well. Whilst he was inhausting his smoking tea, which went rolling and gurgling down his throat, and hissing over the 'hot coppers' of that respectable veteran, a friend joined him, with a wizened face and very black wig, evidently a Colonel too.

The two warriors, waggling their old heads at each other, presently joined breakfast, and fell into conversation, and we had the advantage of hearing about the old war, and some pleasant conjectures as to the next, which they considered imminent. They psha'd the French fleet; they pooh-pooh'd the French commercial marine; they showed how, in a war, there would be a cordon ('a cordong, by---') of steamers along our coast, and 'by ---,' ready at a minute to land anywhere on the other sh.o.r.e, to give the French as good a thrashing as they got in the last war, 'by ---'. In fact, a rumbling cannonade of oaths was fired by the two veterans during the whole of their conversation.

There was a Frenchman in the room, but as he had not been above ten years in London, of course he did not speak the language, and lost the benefit of the conversation. 'But, O my country!' said I to myself, it's no wonder that you are so beloved! If I were a Frenchman, how I would hate you!'

That brutal, ignorant, peevish bully of an Englishman is showing himself in every city of Europe. One of the dullest creatures under heaven, he goes travelling Europe under foot, shouldering his way into galleries and cathedrals, and bustling into palaces with his buck-ram uniform.

At church or theatre, gala or picture-gallery, HIS face never varies.

A thousand delightful sights pa.s.s before his bloodshot eyes, and don't affect him. Countless brilliant scenes of life and manners are shown him, but never move him. He goes to church, and calls the practices there degrading and superst.i.tious: as if HIS altar was the only one that was acceptable. He goes to picture-galleries, and is more ignorant about Art than a French s...o...b..ack. Art, Nature pa.s.s, and there is no dot of admiration in his stupid eyes: nothing moves him, except when a very great man comes his way, and then the rigid, proud, self-confident, inflexible British Sn.o.b can be as humble as a flunkey and as supple as a harlequin.

CHAPTER XXIII--ENGLISH Sn.o.bS ON THE CONTINENT

'WHAT is the use of Lord Rome's telescope?' my friend Panwiski exclaimed the other day. 'It only enables you to see a few hundred thousands of miles farther. What were thought to be mere nebulae, turn out to be most perceivable starry systems; and beyond these, you see other nebulae, which a more powerful gla.s.s will show to be stars, again; and so they go on glittering and winking away into eternity.' With which my friend Pan, heaving a great sigh, as if confessing his inability to look Infinity in the face, sank back resigned, and swallowed a large b.u.mper of claret.

I (who, like other great men, have but one idea), thought to myself, that as the stars are, so are the Sn.o.bs:--the more you gaze upon those luminaries, the more you behold--now nebulously congregated--now faintly distinguishable--now brightly defined--until they twinkle off in endless blazes, and fade into the immeasurable darkness. I am but as a child playing on the sea-sh.o.r.e. Some telescopic philosopher will arise one day, some great Sn.o.bonomer, to find the laws of the great science which we are now merely playing with, and to define, and settle, and cla.s.sify that which is at present but vague theory, and loose though elegant a.s.sertion.

Yes: a single eye can but trace a very few and simple varieties of the enormous universe of Sn.o.bs. I sometimes think of appealing to the public, and calling together a congress of SAVANS, such as met at Southampton--each to bring his contributions and read his paper on the Great Subject. For what can a single poor few do, even with the subject at present in hand? English Sn.o.bs on the Continent--though they are a hundred thousand times less numerous than on their native island, yet even these few are too many. One can only fix a stray one here and there. The individuals are caught--the thousands escape. I have noted down but three whom I have met with in my walk this morning through this pleasant marine city of Boulogne.

There is the English Raff Sn.o.b, that frequents ESTAMINETS and CABARETS; who is heard yelling, 'We won't go home till morning!' and startling the midnight echoes of quiet Continental towns with shrieks of English slang. The boozy unshorn wretch is seen hovering round quays as packets arrive, and tippling drains in inn bars where he gets credit. He talks French with slang familiarity: he and his like quite people the debt-prisons on the Continent. He plays pool at the billiard-houses, and may be seen engaged at cards and dominoes of forenoons. His signature is to be seen on countless bills of exchange: it belonged to an honourable family once, very likely; for the English Raff most probably began by being a gentleman, and has a father over the water who is ashamed to hear his name. He has cheated the old 'governor' repeatedly in better days, and swindled his sisters of their portions, and robbed his younger brothers. Now he is living on his wife's jointure: she is hidden away in some dismal garret, patching shabby finery and cobbling up old clothes for her children--the most miserable and slatternly of women.

Or sometimes the poor woman and her daughters go about timidly, giving lessons in English and music, or do embroidery and work under-hand, to purchase the means for the POT-AU-FEU; while Raff is swaggering on the quay, or tossing off gla.s.ses of cognac at the CAFe. The unfortunate creature has a child still every year, and her constant hypocrisy is to try and make her girls believe that their father is a respectable man, and to huddle him out of the way when the brute comes home drunk.

Those poor ruined souls get together and have a society of their own, the which it is very affecting to watch--those tawdry pretences at gentility, those flimsy attempts at gaiety: those woful sallies: that jingling old piano; oh, it makes the heart sick to see and hear them. As Mrs. Raff, with her company of pale daughters, gives a penny tea to Mrs.

Diddler, they talk about bygone times and the fine society they kept; and they sing feeble songs out of tattered old music-books; and while engaged in this sort of entertainment, in comes Captain Raff with his greasy hat on one side, and straightway the whole of the dismal room reeks with a mingled odour of smoke and spirits.

Has not everybody who has lived abroad met Captain Raff? His name is proclaimed, every now and then, by Mr. Sheriff's Officer Hemp; and about Boulogne, and Paris, and Brussels, there are so many of his sort that I will lay a wager that I shall be accused of gross personality for showing him up. Many a less irreclaimable villain is transported; many a more honourable man is at present at the treadmill; and although we are the n.o.blest, greatest, most religious, and most moral people in the world, I would still like to know where, except in the United Kingdom, debts are a matter of joke, and making tradesmen 'suffer' a sport that gentlemen own to? It is dishonourable to owe money in France. You never hear people in other parts of Europe brag of their swindling; or see a prison in a large Continental town which is not more or less peopled with English rogues.

A still more loathsome and dangerous Sn.o.b than the above transparent and pa.s.sive scamp, is frequent on the continent of Europe, and my young Sn.o.b friends who are travelling thither should be especially warned against him. Captain Legg is a gentleman, like Raff, though perhaps of a better degree. He has robbed his family too, but of a great deal more, and has boldly dishonoured bills for thousands, where Raff has been boggling over the clumsy conveyance of a ten-pound note. Legg is always at the best inn, with the finest waistcoats and moustaches, or tearing about in the flashest of britzkas, while poor Raff is tipsifying himself with spirits, and smoking cheap tobacco. It is amazing to think that Legg, so often shown up, and known everywhere, is flourishing yet. He would sink into utter ruin, but for the constant and ardent love of gentility that distinguishes the English Sn.o.b. There is many a young fellow of the middle cla.s.ses who must know Legg to be a rogue and a cheat; and yet from his desire to be in the fashion, and his admiration of tip-top swells, and from his ambition to air himself by the side of a Lord's son, will let Legg make an income out of him; content to pay, so long as he can enjoy that society. Many a worthy father of a family, when he hears that his son is riding about with Captain Legg, Lord Levant's son, is rather pleased that young Hopeful should be in such good company.

Legg and his friend, Major Macer, make professional tours through Europe, and are to be found at the right places at the right time. Last year I heard how my young acquaintance, Mr. m.u.f.f, from Oxford, going to see a little life at a Carnival ball at Paris, was accosted by an Englishman who did not know a word of the d----language, and hearing m.u.f.f speak it so admirably, begged him to interpret to a waiter with whom there was a dispute about refreshments. It was quite a comfort, the stranger said, to see an honest English face; and did m.u.f.f know where there was a good place for supper? So those two went to supper, and who should come in, of all men in the world, but Major Macer? And so Legg introduced Macer, and so there came on a little intimacy, and three-card loo, &c. &c.. Year after year scores of m.u.f.fs, in various places in the world, are victimised by Legg and Macer. The story is so stale, the trick of seduction so entirely old and clumsy, that it is only a wonder people can be taken in any more: but the temptations of vice and gentility together are too much for young English Sn.o.bs, and those simple young victims are caught fresh every day. Though it is only to be kicked and cheated by men of fashion, your true British Sn.o.b will present himself for the honour.

I need not allude here to that very common British Sn.o.b, who makes desperate efforts at becoming intimate with the great Continental aristocracy, such as old Rolls, the baker, who has set up his quarters in the Faubourg Saint Germain, and will receive none but Carlists, and no French gentleman under the rank of a Marquis. We can all of us laugh at THAT fellow's pretensions well enough--we who tremble before a great man of our own nation. But, as you say, my brave and honest John Bull of a Sn.o.b, a French Marquis of twenty descents is very different from an English Peer; and a pack of beggarly German and Italian Fuersten and Principi awaken the scorn of an honest-minded Briton. But our aristocracy!--that's a very different matter. They are the real leaders of the world--the real old original and-no-mistake n.o.bility.

Off with your cap, Sn.o.b; down on your knees, Sn.o.b, and truckle.