"KEEPING UP APPEARANCES."
THE conductors of the Daily Telegraph have this year
hardly been so well advised as usual in their choice of a holiday subject. There is no genuine difference of opinion among Englishmen as to the value of "keeping up appear- ances," and no argument about it will therefore be quite
S sincere on both sides. They are quite willing to condemn the practice in words, indeed they think it philosophical to do so, and whenever it is condemned they listen with the kind of assent which they give to advice about the immorality of playing cards or of riding bicycles on Sunday. When told that they ought to prefer comfort to show, that it is foolish to dress well and feed badly, that caste is of no importance, and that it is dishonest, or at all events histrionic, to make a show on insufficient means, they all agree, and repeat ancient proverbs, and pity the neighbours guilty of such folly. But they all, or at least the immense majority, go on keeping up appearances all the same. As in so many other cases, their instincts and their opinions are at variance, and while they profess their opinions they obey their instincts. We confess we think that except in their mild hypocrisies, which involve falsity and are therefore to be reprehended, they are entirely in the right. They should, of course, have the courage of their convictions, but their convictions are well founded. Nine times out of ten the family which ceases to care about appearances, and refuses to stint itself in comforts in order to maintain its "position," loses its self-respect, and not only sinks into a lower grade, but becomes in that grade dis- reputable because it has given up self-suppression and the struggle towards the light without which Englishmen become slatternly—odd that there is no masculine equivalent for that word—unenterprising, and in extreme cases hog- gish. It is very easy to say that it is foolish to live on bread and dripping in order to wear broadcloth, when if they would wear corduroy they might have meat and butter, but the people who, having worn broadcloth, give it up on any provocation whatever short of inability to pay for it, have lost their self-respect, have renounced the practice of self- control, and in the majority of cases have given up that habit of looking to to-morrow instead of to-day which with all of Teutonic origin acts as an antiseptic. They have, in fact, abandoned hope, and hope is for them more than a motive power ; it is a preservative against degradation. We write as if we thought only of the lower middle class, but we believe this to be true of all classes. We have seen in the last twenty years much of the impoverished gentry—families " ruined " by the fall in rents, the Irish Land-laws, or the results of foreign competition—and have watched those who struggled and fought and lived meanly in order to "keep up appearances," and those who have given way and have slipped down a grade or two, and we have decided in almost every case that the former possessed the higher natures, and more- over were the wiser folk in that they have kept themselves more ready for the favourable chances of the future. They showed courage, they kept their self-respect, and they beat down the selfishness and thirst for ease which, among Englishmen at all events, rot the very bases of character. The old ladies of Cranford who to keep their grade sub- mitted to a hundred economies, sat with one candle instead of two, ate food so plain that it was hardly appetising, and made a thousand pretences of being well-to-do, were not ignoble, but rather noble, in their struggle, and prudent too, for they remained old "ladies,"—that is, persons of a higher civilisation than those below them, able, should fortune change, at once to reap the full benefit of wider knowledge, more self-controlled habits, and more perfect sense of equality with the very best. People admit this, we think, when the object is the education of children, when the son is sent to college, for instance, literally out of the table money—a thing that occurs every day in clerical families—but it is true always, true when the only object is the maintenance of pride, for in that pride is self-suppression, and perception of the duty of struggling always towards a better fate. To give up is to cease to fight, and the Englishman who ceases to fight in one way or another is very apt to be the Englishman who rots. The children of the latter descend, their sons—unless, indeed, they emigrate—take to drinking or aimless and spirit- less lives, the daughters marry badly, and the whole family, till once more redeemed by a generation of hard labour, slip
down into those refuse classes which lower the whole average of usefulness and efficiency. They become like the people Dickens used to paint as inmates of the Marshalsea and such- like places,—the most useless, and hopeless, and detrimental of all mankind.
But does not "keeping up appearances" involve histrionics, if not falsity? Not necessarily. It may, of course, and if it does that degrades the character as much as the still more common expedient of living on defrauded creditors ; but neither acting, nor lying, nor cheating is a necessary element in keeping up appearances. There is no acting in postponing one comfort to another—good food, for example, to respectable clothes—no falsity in doing as others do at the price of secret economy, no cheating in doing without comfort for the sake of grade if you pay rigidly for the little you are content to buy. Some of the correspondents in the Telegraph seem to think it positively wrong to look well off if you are poor, but why is it wrong if no one is defrauded ? It may be foolish, and in extreme cases it is unwise, but in nine cases out of ten it is the very best course to pursue, prevents humiliations which slowly sap self-respect, and preserves those possibilities of careers without which the reparation of fortunes is impossible. Your business, if the times have gone against you, is not to be comfortable, but to win back your sword as the old Marquis did. John can enter for a Civil Service examination though he has for six months eaten no meat, but John cannot enter for it in rags, or without a hat. It is open, of course, to any one to say that grade is of no value, and that a man may be happier as a carpenter than as a poor professional ; but, then, is happiness the highest object ? It seems to us that the argument surrenders civilisation, and affirms that the head is only the equal of the members. A good many people, we acknowledge, are saying that now, but it remains eternally false. Content is a good thing, and so is the desire of comfort, and both may be perfectly inno- cent, but progress depends on discontent, and on that power to suppress the lower self of which the habit of keeping up appearances is a vulgar, but nevertheless a true, manifes- tation. The restless desire of each class of Englishmen to live, and look, and be like the class next above it has always been a theme, sometimes a worthy theme, for satirists, but essentially it is part of the endless English struggle towards the light, —towards, that is, the position in which men are at once free and cultivated, and in possession of the full powers that Nature has assigned them. Asceticism is a fine creed when its object is higher spiritual life, but which is the true ascetic, the man who, to remain in the professional class, deliberately reduces his expenditure on food to ninepence a day—we can name a doctor who did it—or the man who, to be full every day, steps down among the band-workers, and gives up all the result of generations of culture and refine- ment ? There is plenty of baseness and vulgarity, no doubt, among those who "keep up appearances," and often much that is comic in their pretences, but on the whole the motive which prompts the practice helps to keep up civilisation and strengthens the world.
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