THE BATTLE OF POSITION.
ACOURAGEOUS and clever writer fights hard in this month's Blackwood on behalf of those who struggle through life for what they call "position." It is, he says, rather cynically, as good an object in life as any other of the inferior sort, at least as good a one as money. Yet everybody respects the toil for cash, and everybody ridicules the toil for social position. "Why on earth do we all applaud a tradesman for pushing his business, and reckon it a merit in a man to confine himself in a dingy office for eight hours a day merely for the sake of amassing pounds, shillings, and pence, and yet feel inclined to laugh at him when he spends some of this hard-earned money liberally in the evident desire to make himself a gentleman "'? The writer is careful to show that he means the struggle for position in its conventional or satirical 'sense, not a struggle for a real rise in life ; but he asks where is the harm, if a man likes that pursuit, of putting little wheels in motion to get on the Commission of the Peace, or to obtain a status among "county families," or to secure the entr6e to certain pleasant or, as it may be, merely aristocratic houses ? May not the strife for social success be an education, like any other strife, and develop some at least of the good. qualities de- veloped by most Englishcontests—good temper, address, endurance, and the spirit of toleration? It is cleverly put all that, so cleverly that it will justify hundreds of English families in their own eyes who before half suspected themselves of being humbugs, and deserves therefore a passing reply. The writer of the paper in Blackwood states nothing but the truth, and states it very well, as against the merely satiric school, but he either misses or deliberately ignores the objection raised by graver and more candid men. Nobody has ever argued gravely that a rise in society is a bad object, when the candidate genuinely wishes to obtain it as a real end. If he honestly thinks or, as may happen, knows that above him is a stratum of society where he will be more himself, where thought is wider, and experience less confined, and conversation freer, by all means let him mount. So long as the process is not a series of unworthy compliances, the effort is right and praiseworthy, or at worst as harmless as the effort of water to reach its level. The man who, born to steel forks, or habituated to steel forks, finds he can breathe, more freely where silver is used, is quite in the right to seek those who habitually use silver. There are men to whom a certain external refinement is as healthy as a certain purity of air, and there is just as little reason against their seeking it. They are trying to be themselves to the full, which though not an end exactly, is a means very essential to any good end. The objection to the struggle for position is not that the end is bad, —it may be good or indif-. ferent—but that, as a rule, there is no end at all. The candidate does not want to be anything good or indifferent, but only to seem to be, —wants not to fulfil a function, but to act a part, which is sure to degrade him. The infinite majority of those who struggle for position are not stretching upwards towards the light in order to see better, but trusting that a reflected light from above falling on them may dazzle those they have left behind. If a London tradesman declares he will be a County Member because as a county member he will be in his right place, will be able to exert the strength he feels in himself on politics, and to im- prove the county administration as while a tradesman he could not do, all prosperity be with him. He is certainly doing right according to his lights, probably doing right according to lights much higher than his ; and what can he do more? But for one who strives from this motive ten strive not because they hope to be County Members in the efficient sense, but because they hope to seem County Members in the represen- tative sense, which is degrading. Blackwood says it is not more degrading than an equal effort for money, but Blackwood is talk- ing nonsense which would have made Christopher North, who was anti-pretension incarnate, blush with annoyance. Money does not improve a man, but the work which wins it does. Money is not a noble end except so far as it represents independence, or what is quite as common, "volition," the power to do what one conceives to be worth doing ; but then the means to that end,—even if sought for itself, as cash, gold, in the miser's sense,—is work, and granting honesty, work which must benefit somebody. You cannot get cash out of anything whatever without increasing the sum of the world's power, which is good, even if work be not good in itself and for itself, which work, being partly discipline, probably is. But the usual weapon in the battle for social position is not work, but intrigue, which instead of elevating degrades. The strife is fought by a series of social deferences, each one of which does some particle of injury to the candidate's moral nature; by small compliances, each of which involves a lie; by small efforts, each of which is an expenditure of time that might be better emPloyed. In London the struggle for social position in the conventional sense is practically a struggle to please certain women who can be conciliated only by services, by adroit lying, or by yet more adroit flattery. The services required may of coarse be unobjectionable, but as a rule they are degrading ; the politician, for example, being required to abandon, or conceal, or modify according to his strength his real convictions, while the fills and flatteries are always and radically bad. In the county, again, the battle is fought by deferences. If the man who has got a block of land, and some brains, and no " standing " wants to get standing, he makes himself acceptable to a knot of magnates, partly by doing their work, which is all right if he likes it, partly by paying them court, which is all wrong, and partly by denying his own convictions, which is degrading simply. There is no harm in his keeping them straight on the Bench if he can ; indeed, there may be good as matters go, for the poor benefit; but there is harm in always backing up the local pear whom the candidate does not believe in, and degradation in being savage to poachers when at heart he thinks the Game Laws an oppression. All but the last may be pardoned if the object is really to live among brighter or less prejudiced minds, or people of -eager habits, or those who for any reason whatever are more acceptable to the candidate, but that nine times out of ten is not his object. He only wants to seem to people smaller than himself to be on a level with the great. He does not want to be a J.P., to use Blackwood's illustration, because he wishes to dis- tribute justice, or even because the distribution of justice interests and amuses him, but solely in order that his neighbours may think of him as on a level with other J.P.'s. That is base, if anything is base. The writer in Blackwood objects to lofty standards, and we are not setting up any. We do not object for a moment to any man wearing a red hunting-coat, if it increases his power of riding. We do not object, if it seems to him decidedly pretty in itself. We do not object, if he feels more comfortable in it than in his ordinary clothes. But we do decidedly object, if he wears the coat in order to convince people that he hunts when he .doesn't, and that is what the struggle for position usually means. The man who is himself is usually something, be it what it may,— the reason why genuine aristocrats are often qua aristocrats so efficient,—but the man who merges himself, as the candidate for position must usually merge himself, in other people, is always less than himself,—less, it may be, occasionally and exceptionally, as the diamond is less after cutting, but less usually, as the yew is after it has been cut into a peacock, or a lion, or a Noah's Ark toy.
We have spoken, of course, only of the cases in which the strife is fair, in which the candidate really makes it his profession to rise, and uses all energies to that end ; but frequently the effort is something smaller than this and worse than this, an attempt to misuse wealth,—either by exciting envy, or by unjust political pressure, or by the purchase of alliances,—till it secures an end it ought not to secure, namely, a fictitious importance in the eyes of those who have it not. The struggle in England is practically a struggle of wealth to buy position, which it usually -does by corrupt means of some kind. That corruption degrades, and degrades all the more because the bad means are employed to serve a bad end—an appearance of that which does not exist. We say bad means, because we are trying to define the moral evil, but in practice they are also weak means, and ridiculous on that ground. Position comes to the strong the quicker because it is not sought. All the dangling, and compliance, and Ilunkeyism in the world will not raise a new man in London so quickly as a speech which shakes or supports a Ministry, or any other unmis- takable evidence of power. All the "little wheels" in the world will not give a man county position so quickly as the ability to guide and lead the county, the power to say things which big people must reckon with, or to do things they strongly like or dislike. It is the weakness as well as the folly of the ordinary process which satirists ridicule, and which the writer in Blackwood so completely overlooks. Half the power wasted in conciliating the great lady of the county, if spent on a worthier object would give the great lady of the county an interest in conciliating you.
And after all, the case is stated too favourably for the strugglers when they are all represented as men. The Battle of Position, as it is understood in England, is mainly fought out by women, and it is not a battle which improves them. Men are just as ostenta- tious and as vain as women, and we think rather more subservient, but they do not suffer in this particular form of contention as women do. They cannot get quite so hot and dusty in the fight. They have been bred among realities, and they infuse more reality
into their object. With women who engage in the strife the strife itself is often the end, and of all demoralizing processes commend us to battle for battle's sake. They have, too, a smaller choice of means. A woman who wants position in London or a county must win it,—if her husband does not win it for her,—either by subserviency, or expenditure, or intrigue, or, what is most common of all, by devoting her life to a series of observances so numerous, so complex, and so imperative that her real life cannot be lived. She is not herself, but an actress, who acts all day as well as all night, and very rarely gets paid ; who surrenders affection for applause, friendship for society, enjoyment for the hustling of a crowd. Those surrenders, like all self-denials which neither discipline oneself nor benefit others, degrade, not only by what they produce, but by what they forbid to be produced. A woman mad for position, as thousands of women are in England, does not merely spoil her life and nature as they are, but as they might become; gives up not only what she has, but her opportunities of having. She cannot develop, and it is well for her if she can keep from actually degenerating, if her keenness of perception does not become acridity, her energy fuss, her perseverance stolid obstinacy, her adroitness cunning intrigue. If she loses the game, she retires fatigued to irritation, and with diminished or ex- tinguished self-respect ; if she wins, she gains—what? Usually nothing, except the power of distributing small insolences with impunity.
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