THE MARQUIS OF HASTINGS.
IT is just as well that the life of that unhappy lad, the Marquis of Hastings, who died this week, should have been, from his own point of view, a failure. He had done a vast amount of mischief in six years, and mischief of a much more vulgar kind than those who write sermons about him seem to suspect, and if he had succeeded would have done much more. It is always assumed by the critics of English society that we are not a gambling people, that we do not sit for weeks playing, as the Chinese, for instance, do, or offer our lives for stakes, as the half- breeds of Spanish America have repeatedly done, or make play a life-long occupation, as the Spanish hidalgo very frequently does, but we suspect the difference between the Anglo-Saxon and other races is mainly one of form. Neither Englishmen nor Americans are as nations addicted to dominoes, or little games of cards at noonday, or twopenny wagers, such as are made every hour in Italy, as to how many fingers the player may be holding up. The energy of the Anglo-Saxon extends even to his gambling, and he requires a high stake to throw him off his mental balance. Whenever, however, the high stake is visible, whenever, that is, it seems possible to grow rich, really rich, suddenly and without labour, the Englishman shows all the symptoms of delirium, becomes just as reckless as the Spaniard, just as absorbed in the pursuit as the Chinese. The middle class, which boasts in so lofty and, we must say, in so sickening a way of its steady habits, which is always preaching on its eleventh beatitude, " Blessed are the respectable," has been seized over and over again,—three times certainly within the memory of middle- aged men,—with a passion for gambling as marked as that of the poor lad who owned the Earl. He staked ancient estates, they newly made money ; but in recklessness, in eager greed, in utter contempt for any law save a sort of trade custom, the rules of the mercantile ring, there was not a pin to choose between the racing Marquis and the scores of sedate citizens who went down in the panic of 1866. Even now, when speculation is temporarily at an end, the world would stare a little if it could read the names in some of the bookmakers' lists, and see how many of the smug, and the respectable, and the industrious are risking more than money,—conscience, character, and human lives,—on horses they can barely name, never saw, and could not estimate if they did see. It was this latent and most vulgar pas- sion for sudden gain to which a career like that of the Marquis gave new vitality. His rank, and a certain tinsel glitter about his ways of life,—glitter more like that which surrounds some parvenu of the Second Empire than that affected by the old noblesse,—made him very conspicuous, his habit of playing for great stakes drew eyes on him, and his astounding success created in certain classes a perfect fever of greedy excitement. What ! a boy like that win £70,000 in a week ! Here was El Dorado, and to El Dorado the sporting classes rushed as they would rush to-morrow to a lottery office, if Government were ever foolish enough to licence a new Bish, and Bish had the brains to make his lottery a tempting one to the British temperament, many tickets, few prizes, and those high enough to mean fortune for the winners. Some won, some lost, for gambling, economically speak- ing, is only a redittribution of money ; but all became less industrious, more greedy, and more resentful of the monotony of ordinary labour. They became like the Marquis, eager not for the sport, which would be excusable or commendable, not for the excite- ment, which would be, at all events, natural; but for the stake, for the " pot " of unearned money which was to be had out of other folks' ruin or injury, and must be obtained by any amount of cleverness or dodging. The true gambler, the man who loves the chances rather than the cash, plays his stake out, and would not be " safe " even if he could. The temper of the Bourse got into the industrious, — and the temper of the Bourse to men like the English, who cannot, like Orientals, go mad for an hour and then be sane for a day, is fatal at once to industry, to perseverance, to thrift, and to fair play, small virtues all of them, may be, but all of them essential to the well-being of a people who, lacking them, are apt to lack virtues altogether. The Marquis demoralized Englishmen just as much as if he had set up a faro-table in Trafalgar Square, and in just as vulgar a way ; and if he had succeeded, would have demoralized them rather more than he did. He might, of course, have succeeded, and our own impression is that had he been phy- sically a stronger man he would have succeeded. The orthodox remark that gamblers are always ruined is just as false as such generalizations usually are. Le Blanc is not ruined, and a racing man may by calculation make his transactions as safe as if he had "the pull of the table" in his favour. There is no more reason why every racing man should be beaten in the long run, than why every gambler in ship insurances should be beaten in the long run. The late Mr. Thornton would probably have won on the racecourse to the end, as he did at Lloyds, and the main difference between the two modes of betting is this. It is not possible for an underwriter to win money by making ships go down, and it is possible for a " sportsman " to win money by making horses lose, and the temptation to fraud, therefore, is an additional evil belonging to the racecourse. But the real evil is the stimulant it gives to the English passion for unearned money in large sums ; and it was this passion, which is neither more nor less than hard greed, which was stimulated by the Marquis's example, and will be slightly checked by his failure to win. The check will not be much felt among the people, but it will influence the very wealthy and the aristocratic, and the instinctive annoy- ance Englishmen feel at the destruction of an ancient house and an old estate is probably in this instance misplaced.
There is another reason why such an example of failure may be beneficial. Unless we are greatly mistaken, we are on the thres- hold of another era of mingled vice and levity, a bad time, in which immense energy and grand means will be habitually directed to what is called the pursuit of pleasure, i. e., to indi- vidual gratification. The French Empire is probably the real source of the mischief. Men must and will seek some vent for their energies, strive for something, and when a man has all the wealth and all the rank he wants, the something is sure to be one of two things,—power or individual enjoyment, politics or the elaborate selfishness called " pleasure." The Empire forbids politics, and the jeunesse dore'e tries to make its life full,—for that is the real object,—by intrigues, duels, feasts, and defiances to public opinion,—the latter often to natures originally brave as exciting as defiances to an overbearing political party. Since the Roman Empire fell there has hardly been a class at once so cor- rupt and so frivolous as the new generation of Parisian pleasure- seekers, so defiant of moral laws or so profuse of every kind of resource. Still their fives look to inexperienced men full of ex- citement, adventure, change. The cosmopolitan class is always more or less influenced by Paris, and in England several causes have combined to make French examples effective. The per- manent drawback of English life,—its tendency to the humdrum, —has for many years been intensified by the dullness of the Court, by the passion for accumulation, and by the wide spread of the pseudo- asceticism inculcated by Calvinists ignorant of Calvin. Bourgeois manners have reigned, and bourgeois manners are regulated on the assumption that life ought to be dull, that half the amuse- ments man has invented are wicked and the other half very fri- volous, that originality in life is a deadly error, and that the usual is, therefore, of necessity the respectable. Even in politics the bourgeois spirit has prevailed. Charles Fox has become im- possible. To rise in public life by sheer brain without much work or close attention to business has become almost hopeless, and no very great issues having been involved, the young have looked to politics as only just more interesting than daily domesticities. Among an energetic race given to sport, to travel, and to adventure, a reaction against so monotonous a conception of life was sure to arrive, and various accidents, the establishment of a new and younger Court, the rise of some serious political ques- tions, and a marked change in the tone and aspirations of women, have all contributed to make it rapid. There is energy again in the young, and it is taking two lines, the active pursuit of politics and social investigation, and a pursuit of pleasure which sets manners, opinion, and in some cases, though not all, morals at defiance. People are going their own way, and not the public way, and while some dozen or so " radical swells " are outraging middle- aged clubmen by declaring that the world needs reform in the interest of the poor, and scores of University men are driving clergymen wild by preaching a new creed half-social, half- religious, as many and more are playing a part not much to be -distinguished from that of the Marquis of Hastings. These latter want a check, to make them consider themselves, and his fate is just the one to induce them to do it. It is of no use talking to them of duties which they are too light-headed to perceive, or of an opinion which they are almost as much inclined to fight as they are to fight a mob, and from much the same motive, but it is of use to show them what failure means. They are of the nineteenth century, after all, these boys, and do not want to sit down at forty with broken constitutions, ruined fortunes, and burdened consciences. They want to win, and the sight of a man who ought to have won and did not will be a healthful douche. Not to speak of the .Marquisate, which was unimportant, Lord Hastings, twentieth or so Baron Grey de Ruthyn, and fourteenth or so Earl of Loudoun, with a fortune nominally of £30,000 a year, and really of about £18,000, had, at twenty-one, a position which can be equalled only in the United Kingdom, youth, health, wealth, distinction, and political power. Every society was open to him, any marriage easy to him, any form of life possible to him, and, to crown all, in the effort to attain any position iu the State he was from the first where other and successful men are at forty- five. He must have had sound brains, too, originally to have suc- ceeded as he did for two years, and a courage which, wretchedly -as it was used, it is difficult for Englishmen not to admire, a -courage which we may call recklessness, but which was, externally at least, very like the fortitude under adversity of better men, and -which in any line of life would have doubled his powers. He chose the " exciting " life, found it a bore, tried to escape ennui by plunging deeper, found that a bore too, and died at twenty-six without having even achieved success in his own poor walk, 'without having won the stake, without having achieved the blue ribbon of the Turf, without having earned the poor right to popularity among turf men. Six years of extremely little en- joyment,—for he cannot have enjoyed his own atrociously vulgar lavishness,—ended in the total ruin of a great house as old as the dynasty. That, wholly apart from the moral aspect of the -matter, is the sort of result the infinite majority of such men get out of such lives. Here and there, once or twice in a century, a Lord Saltire may turn up, but even among the mino-
rity of successful men the result is usually a Steyne. Is it worth while to risk five chances of ruin for a sixth chance of developing into a Steyne ? To outsiders the odds seem certainly -a little heavy.
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