"THE BRITON'S BIBLE."
THE special repute of the late Sir Bernard Burke throughout the United Kingdom, is something of an intellectual puzzle. He doubtless knew his odd business very well, but so also do the English and Scotch heralds, whose names are, nevertheless, wholly unknown to the great body of the well-to-do. He wrote a good many books for the general reader; but we question if any of them have been widely read, except the "Vicissitudes of Families," which is a book of gossip about families that have fallen, rather than one either of antiquarian research or special knowledge. He is said to have been most obliging and courteous to all inquirers ; but there has been no complaint of any lack of those qualities in the English heralds; and, indeed, those qualities are almost inherent in the business itself, which would repel any one who could not bear endless worrying about trivialities by people often as well instructed in those trivialities as the victims of their curiosity. Inquiries into pedigree have a certain interest ; but disputes about arms are, except when treated as matters of business, suffocatingly wearisome. The truth is, we fancy, that Sir Bernard Burke became known because the public took to his "Peerage" as the one which, on the whole, suited their fancy best. Those who were within the caste liked it because it recorded their pedigrees in an honorific way, with- out reference to unpleasing and forgotten facts, and because it suppressed the ages of their women-kind; and those who were outside liked it for its convenience, and for a certain splendour in its external appearance. The Royal colour seems somehow to befit a volume of the sort. They found in it all they wanted to know, they liked the look of it as it lay about or stood on the shelves, and they bought it in such numbers that it was described by satirists as "the Briton's Bible." It is very rare, we are told, to find a Peer's house without a copy ; and that is natural enough, for the caste is growing past the powers of any ordinary memory. But there are thousands of house- holds, wholly unconnected with the Peerage—where, in fact, no Peer would be known by sight—which would not be with- out a " Burke " for the world, and in which its covers are always a little worn. Hundreds of persons, often keen and always sane, make annotations on its margins ; and we have personally known at least two instances in which these annotations have been so careful as to call forth cordial expressions of thanks from Sir Bernard Burke himself, and in which the annotators were professional men without the slightest pretensions to birth.
What these people buy the book for is an enigma about which scores of essays have been written, but which has never, to our thinking, been satisfactorily solved. Thackeray said it was all snobbishness ; but the sentence is rather a condemnation than an enlightening criticism. A great many Englishmen are snobs in grain ; but we all know friends who are not snobs at all, who neither seek the great, nor love the great, nor defer to the great, and who, nevertheless, consult " Burke " as assiduously as the rest of mankind. The motive is certainly no desire for historic information, for the pedigree of a noble is just the one point in connection with him which English- men care nothing about, nor, if they did care, would they confine their reading to Sir Bernard Burke. They do not even know what the few families of antiquity still left in the Peerage really did for the country, and have, indeed, very often an absurd idea that because most of them have ended, at one time or another, in heiresses, their descendants have no right to pride themselves on very ancient descent. They acknowledge that Elizabeth was the heiress of Cerdic, though her great-grandfather was hardly even a squire, but will not accept the present Duke of Northumber- land as representative of anybody except Sir Hugh Smithson. Nor can we think their motive is mere worship of rank. If it were, they would hardly despise or ignore all rank outside British rank so heartily as they do. There are, probably, not ten men in England outside the diplomatic service, and a short list of noble houses, who know anything whatever about Con- tinental rank, or could describe, with an approach to clear- ness, the ideas by which the Continental nobles appreciate, or depreciate, each others' rights to European position. They do not even worship such rank as is recorded in the Almanach de Gotha and think the pride of a house like that of Mecklen- burg, which was reigning when Charlemagne struck down the Wends, positively silly. As for estimating comparative rank, they are entirely incapable of it ; judge solely by title, and think that a Prince of Teck, who, though demi-royal, is Prince only by creation, and a Prince of Roumania, who is a Hohen- zollern, stand on the same level. Their true motive, we fancy, is none of these, but simply an interest in the conspicuous.. They like to know about people, who they are, how they are connected with each other, and what their position is ; and as the persons recorded in the "Peerage" are the most conspicuous of those reasonably near to them, they buy and, on occasion, consult the "Peerage," which tells. them all they want to know. If anybody published a. similar book about the most visible folk of any country town, the citizens would buy that, and in a very little while fall into a habit of annotating it too. That is the secret of the success of the society journals, which, in many cases, so far from expressing any deference for the aristocracy, are penetrated through and through with a malign hatred or jealousy of those whose goings and comings, marriages and divorces, they so anxiously record. The desire to read the list of the presents given to Lady Clara Vere de Pere on her marriage, which seems to pervade all London, is as much and as little ridiculous as the desire of the villagers to read about " their " Miss Huggins's wedding. In both instances, the attraction is the human drama, best studied, as they feel, in the actions and destinies of the most conspicuous.
It will all pass away, of course, with the progress of democracy and enlightenment? Will it ? It may, for all things are possible ; but there is little evidence of it as yet We hear that precisely the same feeling is showing itself in America towards the most conspicuous class there, the hereditary millionaires now becoming numerous, and also towards the British aristocracy ; while in England, the feeling, instead of dying away, seems to filter down to deeper strata every day. Democracy loves equality; but when the pro- prietor of the Morning Post reduced its price to a penny, he had the nerve to retain its speciality as the aristocratic reporter, and consequently, if rumour is not persistently false, earned at a penny three times, or five times, the amount that threepence had ever yielded. The evening journals live in part by personal facts—just read the steady record in one of them of the mutations of Scotch property— while every detail about the lives of the great is greedily recorded. Indeed, the appetite for " Burke " is increasing, until it begins to include the whole class of millionaires throughout the world, they being now as conspicuous as nobles, and to swallow, with reserves, but with evidently in- creasing gusto, the personages of the " Almanach de Gotha.' These latter are a little strange at first, but the British digestion is getting accustomed to them in a gradual way which is not a. little odd. It does not care much about Bourbons, or anything about Hohenzollerns, their chief excepted; but no Archduke of Austria can do anything bad or good without being served up. at once as a tit-bit for the British devotee of "Burke." We verily believe there was as much said in London about "John Orth " as in Vienna ; and the Archduke Ludwig will be watched on his tour round the world as keenly as a Prince of Wales. The great Austrian nobles will come next, then the Spanish, and then those of all Europe ; and the first publisher who translates the Almanach de Gotha, printing it in type which old eyes can read, will make a fortune. The desire for such details is not an ennobling one ; but if the spirit of envy could be kept out of it, we do not know that it would do much harm. Certainly it would do no more harm than the curiosity which pervades every provincial town in Europe, and which in America has grown so rampant that not to answer an unasked interviewer, is considered in some sense an insult to the majesty of the people. The worship of " Burke " is at least better than the worship of "La Chronique Scandaleuse," if only because it is the worship of something supposed to be better, instead of something assumed to be worse, than the average citizen. The bazaar will talk, as it did, we doubt not, in the days of Ninus; and " Burke " only secures that, when it talks about people, it shall have the external facts of their history tolerably right. There is not much harm in that. Nor do we see much chance of an end to the process. The French democracy made it death to be an aristocrat, and failed even to check the desire for titles; and if the House of Lords were abolished to-morrow, the thousand ennobled families of the Kingdom would socially stand the higher, because there could be no more of them.
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