Family Treasures
BY JOHN PULLEN.
SOMEBODY—it may have been a leader-writer in The Times—once described the House of Lords as the natural protector of every man who had a silver tea-pot or a dozen silver tea-spoons to bequeath to his descendants. That was in the brave days before the War when we still had a stock of such complacent phrases for daily use .and went on repeating them with a gusto that never quite lost its novelty. We talked of " a Stake in the country," of the English sovereign as " worth its weight in gold," of the City of London as the " strong- box of Europe." Perhaps we never knew quite what we meant ; but the very repetition had in it something that ministered subtly to our sense of comfort and security. If a thing was only said often enough, surely it must be true. That is how we felt about it in the old, easy days. Familiarity bred, not contempt as the lying proverb has it, but an atmosphere of confidence : a belief that the eternal verities were nothing so very mysterious after all, that the order of our being was based upon principles well within the grasp of average intelligence, that we might walk contentedly in the old ways (" sleep soundly in your beds " was the actual " slogan ") without too much regret for the past or undue apprehension for the future.
All very short-sighted and improvident, no doubt ; and we paid for it in full measure. Yet there are limits to everything, even to the destructive consequences of the cataclysm of 1914. Though much perished, much also survived. Human instincts, after all, are not so easy to obliterate. You may expel nature with a pitch- fork—even with machine-guns and trench mortars— but she has an obstinate habit of returning to the attack. " It only shows what Natur' is, Sir," said Mr. Squeers in his sententious vein ; " She's a rum 'un, is Natur'." And a 'rum 'un she remains to this hour. Her ways are as incalculable as ever ; sage or saint, statesman or philosopher, we understand them little better than the Yorkshire schoolmaster. But at least they are a heritage common to all of us, one great unifying factor that is still left us in these distracted times. Let us be thankful that not even the most advanced of sociologists has yet found means of reforming them out of existence.
" An ill-favoured thing, Sir, but mine own," said TMichstond of his homely bride. It is the unspoken reflection of thousands of us every day of our existence. There is no instinct more tenacious than that of possession, of intimate personal association with some external object ; the need for something of our very own, some- thing that bears our individual impress, that reflects upon us, and upon us alone, some familiar image that bas its origin in ourselves. What the particular object may be, matters but little ; it may be great or small, magnificent or commonplace, imposing or ridiculous. The one essential is that it should be ours. It must be a natural-born citizen of the esoteric Kingdom of which every individual among us is the undisputed sovereign. Beyond that, nothing is of any account. What matter whether the shrine contain a rude wooden effigy or a marble figure carved by a master hand ? It is all one to the priest of the temple.
Every man is a priest of his own private shrine, and to each shrine belongs its own inalienable idol. For one it may be a stately picture gallery full of ancestral portraits—ranging in due succession from the bearded Tudor merchant, the founder of the house, through all the long line of his descendants : the Cavalier who stood siege against Fairfax ; the florid veteran in full- bottomed wig who saw service under Marlborough ; the Georgian seigneur to whose features Reynolds has lent a touch of his own serene and gracious spirit ; the Victorian magnate, stiff, frock-coated, and benevolent ; the slim figure in khaki—keen-eyed and erect of carriage —with whom so many fond hopes lie buried beneath the Flanders mud. But picture galleries are the luxury of the few. Most of us are satisfied with something much less pretentious. With a few wood-cuts or engrav- ings, perhaps a little the worse for wear. Look at this one, for example—the presentment of great-great-unee George, a stout old Warwickshire parson, famous in his day for feats across country and over the bottle. Why he sat for his portrait in a tasselled nightcap, no one has ever explained ; but one cannot look at the picture and wish him otherwise. Or observe that plaster relief over the chimneypiece, in its square oak frame ; no great work of art to be sure, but enough to guard the memory of a face once alight with every noble impulse, with every generous emotion. The list may be multiplied at will. Here is a sandalwood box of Indian design, full of carved ivory letters ; here a pair of bowls cut from the timbers of an old bridge that was lost in the floods of half a century ago ; here a grandfather clock, still ticking gallantly as it has ticked these seventy years ; here a set of brass tobacco-stoppers shaped in the likeness of Pickwick characters ; here—but quo fessum rapitis? The number of such family treasures is legion. Who does not know them ? Who has not eyed and handled them with the wistful curiosity of childhood, neglected them perhaps in the arrogance of youth, returned to them with fondness redoubled in declining years ?
We all remember the scene in the School for Scandal when Charles Surface sells his family portraits to meet his pressing financial needs. He relieves the proceedings with some admirable raillery. " To be sure ! when a man wants money, where the plague should he get assistance, if he can't make free with his own relations ? " —and so forth. It is all very plausible ; - Charles is a high-spirited, devil-may-care young fellow, thriftless and prodigal if you will, but with his heart wholly in the right place. That is what we arc invited to believe. Yet somehow it won't do ; it really won't. His uncle is reconciled to the transaction when his own portrait is withheld from the hammer, but the salve to Sir Oliver's feelings is no salve to ours and makes no amends for poor Aunt Deborah—" a woman who set such a value on herself "—knocked down for the paltry sum of five pounds ten, or for the two members of Parliament who suffer, for the first time in their lives, the indignity of being bought and sold. Turn it how you will, the
incident leaves a disagreeable impression ; it runs counter to something deeper than the proprieties, deeper than any moral canon—to some primitive tribal instinct that is older than civilization itself. There are some things that are not done : that is all there is to say about it These are not days in which any cohesive influence can safely be neglected. Let us cling resolutely to the family bond and to all things, great or small, that make for its outward manifestation. Here is something that the most irreclaimable Victorian of us all may share with his children; be they ever so modern and emancipated ; something too which the children themselves will be glad to share, in the fullness of time, with the generation that comes after them. If the House of Lords is the true guardian of this tradition—as we used to say before the War—long may their Lordships flourish I There could be no stronger argument against their abolition. Let them " thwart the will of the people " (is not that the phrase ?) to their hearts' content, so long as they stand sentinel over our tobacco-stoppers and keep the tasselled night-cap on the head of great-great-uncle George.
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