MR. BRYCE ON RANK.
MR. PIC KERSGILL, M.P. for Bethnal Green, in a lecture on Shakespeare delivered to his constituents on Tues- day, denounced " rank " as a "fetish," meaning thereby, we presume, hereditary rank. If he meant all rank, he was talking nonsense, or rather, denouncing as curable an evil, if it be an evil, which no human volition can affect. You cannot -organise so much- as a shop without conceding temporary rank to its controlling or inspecting officers, and after a time, that rank will receive deference from all who know precisely what it means. No human power can prevent sailors from deferring to an old Admiral who has won a pitched battle, even if he is in retreat; nor can a maritime service be conceived in which that kind of claim to respect could be entirely absent ;
yet the service remain as efficient as before. Rank in that sense is as inevitable a factor in human affairs as old age, or
venerableness, or impressiveness of bearing, and any effort to abolish it would be like an effort to do away with the influence of spring, or the melancholy of the sea, or the awfulness of certain scenery. It is there, and will remain there for all your talking. It is, of course, hereditary rank, -artificial rank, which Mr. Pickersgill is denouncing, and he has behind him men who employ much stronger arguments than the one implied in the word " fetish,"—a word to which the reply is, that it is better to make a fetish, and thereby acknowledge something higher than man, than to worship yourself as highest. Mr. Bryce, for example, in his recent book on America, produces an argument against rank which, if true, is really a formidable one, that its existence positively diminishes the happiness of nations. The whole meaning of his chapter on the subject is, that the social happiness, happiness like that of a healthy man on a summer's morning, which he ascribes to Americans as a nation, is greatly due to the absence of the very idea of artificial rank. It is, he argues, because there is no such thing, no caste above whose disapproval is feared or whose ways must be imitated by those below, that American men are courteous and American women without One. They have nobody to consider except themselves, and therefore they are themselves, natural, gay, and happy like children when enjoying a pleasant time. Reserve vanishes, because nobody is looking on ; competition is abandoned, because there is nothing to aspire to ; and all being equal, instinctive kindness teaches all how to behave to each other. Women in particular lose the uneasiness which in England is their great defect, and tend to become refined, as innocent children are refined, by sheer force of naturalness and absence of constraint. In Mr. Bryce's judgment, it is clear, rank is a cloud needlessly intercepting light from the people, or rather a superincumbent weight the continuous bearing of which takes much of what little instinctive joy there is, out of the popular heart. If that view is correct, and if the evil is remediable, argument ends, and the democracy should in its own interests abolish rank ; but then, are those two assumptions proved ? We question it greatly, though we acknowledge a certain plausibility in Mr. Bryee's statement under certain conditions.
In an ideal state of society, we suppose all rank—and by "rank" we mean for the moment the right to expect a certain
social deference—would be a personal and temporary attribute, that is, would either be a reward for direct service to the community, or an acknowledgment of surpassing excellence in some department of life, or a recognition of some gift deemed admirable by those who accorded the recognition. Lord Wolseley, for example, and Mr. Bright—we speak in this instance of his character, not his politics—and Lord Tennyson would, if England were a democratic Republic, all three possess rank, without objection or cavil from the body of the people, but the rank being personal, would perish with them. Grade, in fact, would depend upon service or character, or those few incommunicable gifts, such as genius, beauty, and perhaps daring of the superlative kind, which, being secretly admitted by most men to spring from a divine source, inspire a respect which is with the majority quite involuntary and uncontrollable. That would, no doubt, be a satisfactory state of society; but then, is it one which ever is or can be produced by human effort 1' It requires a remodelling not only of the form of modern society, but of its inner nature, its very heart; so that respect shall only be claimed successfully by those to whom the democratic theorist admits it to be rightfully due. Until that has occurred—and it is, of course, possible in some far distant future—the community will persist in extending the reasons for paying deference, and including among them some which are doubtful or positively bad. There never was a community yet in which power, popularity, wealth, or arrogance did not claim and receive precisely that deference which is the only grace now accorded by opinion to rank ; and any one of the four may, and probably will, impair the happi- ness and the naturalness of the community quite as much as the attribute which we now call "aristocracy." Ask any free Russian how the opinion of the powerful weighs in that great Empire, where, though hereditary rank exists, the only real difference is power ; how it crushes out all freedom not only of action but even of thought, how servile as well as uneasy society becomes. The ascendency of demagogues is nearly as oppres- sive, and quite as destructive of social ease,—imagine a society in which it was bad form not to imitate demagogues even in deportment and dress, a society which existed in France for nearly a decade ! Of arrogance we know little in England, because it is held in check by the influence of rank ; but that influence once departed, we should soon know what it meant, and with what benumbing influence it can weigh upon general society, as even now it weighs upon hundreds of small societies, as, for example, in the small country towns which, uncontaminated by the presence of "rank," bend in perpetual subservience to groups whose sole claim to deference is that they do claim it, and being arrogant, claim it success- fully. We have known the wealthiest and most influential man in a town unable to take a seat because he was a tradesman, and a professional man was present, for if he had done it, he would have lost all professional custom. The pressure of the arrogant, with their eternal rules of the becoming, and the expedient, and the "nice," withers the naturalness of any society on which it falls far more than that of any aristocracy, which is free at least from any desire wilfully to coerce those below. It is wealth, however, which in this country would take the place of rank, and which would exert all that kill-joy influence which Mr. Bryce attributes to its present rival,—an influence all the more acute because it not only debases but impoverishes. Vying with the rich impoverishes far more quickly than vying with the distinguished; and while you can- not gain rank by frauds or oppressions, you can gain wealth, which, again, can be displayed, as in an instance recorded in this week's newspapers, in a way that vulgarises the imagination of a whole community, and therefore diminishes not only its immediate happiness, but its inherent and permanent capacity for becoming happy. With rank abolished in England, society would become like the society of the old Free Towns, or of some commercial circles among ourselves, in which deference was claimed by money and accorded to it, and most men and more women were deprived of naturalness by an uneasiness born of a sense of comparatively inferior power to spend or to hoard up the means of enjoyment. They say —Mr. Bryce knows—that in some cities of the North this social order has been attained already, and that nowhere on earth is there so little ease, so little joyousness, so much of the sense of embarrassment, of rivalry, and of contemptuous watching from above. The true question to be settled, therefore, is whether the hereditary descent of a claim to deference—and rank
without privilege can be nothing more—acts as an addition to the inevitable and depressing claims of a minority on the majority, or whether, by opposing, it materially lightens them. We should say the result was, on the whole, the latter, and that "rank," as understood in England, distinctly lightened the burden which social life would without it have to bear. Its existence may be an evil in se,—nay, as contrasted with the arrangements which would prevail in an ideal society, it must be one ; but it mitigates and restrains evils which in its absence would have far more deplorable effects.
We have said nothing, and wish to say nothing, of the positive good sometimes alleged to arise from the existence of rank in a community, the higher standard of honour, the loftier conception of duty, and the appetite for polish, because we do not believe these allegations to be historically quite true. Aristocracies rot very often, and we do not see why all the virtues claimed for rank derived from a Sovereign should not appertain to rank when it is more completely self-dependent. The man of birth, as it seems to us, is more likely to display them than the man of rank, and he may exist in Switzerland now, and in Vermont by-and-by, just as well as in any Kingdom. The heir of Washington, if he existed, would be, we may depend, an aristocrat in America, and, moreover, would be as dangerous a claimant of the Presidency as M. Cannot was in France. But we are a little puzzled, we confess, to perceive that those who make so much of rank as to wish to revolutionise a society in order to upset it, never acknow- ledge that if they could put an idea into the people, they could upset it at once. All the evils which Mr. Bryce believes to spring from artificial rank, spring entirely from the reverence with which it is regarded. If nobody minds rank except as a method of arranging processions, rank can exert no injurious influence either upon social happiness or anything else. Power can, wealth can, even arrogance can, because all these things may demand a certain expenditure of positive energy in resisting them. The powerful man may deprive you of a right, the wealthy man may buy up the luxuries you want, the arrogant man may be an active bully; but the influence of rank is purely subjective. Let those who suffer clean their own minds of it—that is, clean their own minds of envy, sensitiveness, and imitativeness—and rank is for them as if it had never been. That is. we are told, the precise condition of rank, mere rank, in Italy, where, though birth is regarded with such deep respect as to be even known to the common people, the reverence for rank has gradually died away; and it might be its condition in England also. Suppose all men, and still more all women, ceased to care two straws what people of rank thought, ceased so completely as to be without the feeling of defiance as well as without the feeling of deference, where would rank be ? Is not all this denunciation of it and argument against it a sign of weakness, resembling very closely the tippler's hatred of the gin-shop? He wants the shop closed, he wants it taxed, he wants it shut on Sundays. Very good; grant the shop to be abominable ; but suppose you never enter one, what is it to you, or how long will it exist ?
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