PROVINCIALISM AND LONDON CULTURE.
"The Wanderer," that very tedious novel of Madame
d'Arblay's decadent period, there is at least one exquisite t hing,—the reason given by the man of fashion for not coming to see his mother. He does not like her, but that is not all,— it is "so rustic to have a mother." When the man of ton of a hundred years ago said "rustic," he meant what his modern equivalent expresses by "provincial." Probably no actual cox- comb of any period ever had the effrontery to say exactly what Madame d'Arblay makes the man in her novel say. But it is the mission of genius to develop truth into artistic exaggera- tions that will serve evermore as symbols. And this sublime piece of impertinence has long been to us the symbol of a great many impertinences of opinion that proceed from certain extremely artificial cliques of London society,—salons generally presided over by ladies who have discarded all creeds—moral, religions, and philosophical—and frequented by as many men and women of real genius as are willing to purchase the right of entry by leaving on the door- step whatever reality of character, conviction, or ability made them worth bidding. It was obviously of such salons that Mr. Henry James was thinking when he told us many years ago that society was extremely fond of men of letters, admiring in them nothing so much as their power of talking consecutively,—that society was indeed so fond of the man of letters that it was willing to give him a cup of tea and be kind to him, always upon the understanding that when he came into society he would be considerate enough not to tall,: consecutively. It is in such salons that one hears the word " provincial " uttered with the delicately damning emphasis that strikes terror to the heart of every man bred in the provinces, who has lingered long enough in the exhausting air of the capital to be enervated by its influence ; but only stirs the sense of humour in the provincial whose moral thews and sinews are still strung at open-air pitch.
Ever since the barbarians demolished Rome, the antagonism between urban ultra-refinement and crude provincial force has been a matter of instinct among the nations of the West. Like the antagonism between a man and a lion, it is an in- stinct of fear, but of fear conscious of latent mutual fasci- nation which leaves it an open question whether the physically stronger or the physically weaker will have the upper hand. If the question is to be settled in the first onrush, the man, taken at unawares, will have no chance against the lion—he goes down under its superior brute force. But if he is forewarned, and has some knowledge of the art of daunting savage beasts, then it is not impossible that the lion nay be either forced upon a sullen retreat or taken captive for exhibition. The other side of the analogy is too obvious to require elaborating. Only the provincial who has never left his native " earth " can be ignorant of what happens when he and the superfine Londoner meet at close quarters. We only ask leave to remind both that there is a natural fasci- nation between them as well as a natural antagonism, and that the antagonism is rooted in fear on both sides. The kind of Londoner who calls everybody outside his own clique 'provincial," is almost always London born and bred, when he is not of provincial extraction so lowly and obscure that it can be more easily forgotten than forgiven. In the latter case, he is simply an impostor, who may be left to get his due from the pen and pencil of the caricaturist. The other kind is more worth taking seriously. Born of parents whose local complexion and provincial angles have long been effaced by the friction of London cosmopolitanism, he starts where they left off. He cannot look back upon a time when he was new to London, and conscious of provincialisms of dress, manner, or accent, which put him at a superficial disadvantage. Still less can he look back upon a day when London was an unknown world to him, and his thoughts and dreams were bounded, as they were inspired, by the life of the country-town, the village, the vicarage, the manor, or the farm. He is sure to know a great variety of charming and characteristic bits of English, Scotch, and Irish scenery, besides foreign cities and transatlantic States, for the cultivated Londoner travels and chooses his holiday resort with the fine taste that is his mark in all things. But for the shaping of character, there is all the difference between knowing a hundred places as a tourist knows them, and having grown up in one,—about the same difference that there is between being bred up by a wise and good mother, and being on the dinner-list of a score or so of pretty and pleasant women in society.
To grow up in a corner of the country is to come in contace, before we can think for ourselves, with a complete set of definite local ideas in manners, morals, politics, and religion. It is not necessarily to adopt these ideas ; it is not necessarily to respect them. But it is to know them all round and intimately as we know our brothers and sisters, our parents and ourselves. Our attitude towards them may be sympathetic or the reverse —that will depend upon our individual characters—but it cannot possibly be indifferent. It will partake more or less of the nature and of the strength of prejudice. In the pro- vincial of narrow intelligence, prejudice almost always em- bitters political and religious opinion as well as judgment of character. In the provincial of generous intelligence, con- tact with the cosmopolitanism of London quickly unseats prejudice from all the strongholds of opinion, leaving it only in possession of the holy places of affection, which are all the stronger for being reinforced by the irrational influences of arbitrary association. But it is one thing to have succeeded in the course of an apprenticeship to London life, in separating judgments that should be purely intellectual from the sentiment of early association, and quite another thing never to have had that sentiment ; and this sentiment is precisely what the ultra-refined Londoner of the second generation too often lacks. He is so entirely free from all and every kind of definite association in religion, in politics, in manners and morals, that though he may take a sort of artistic pleasure in studying the local colour of any part of the country, as presented in modern novels, he rather shudders at living incarnations of such colour when he chances to run against them in circles of less rarefied atmosphere than that which he by preference inhabits.
It must be granted that he does not always shudder with- out cause. Whatever he may lack, this kind of Londoner must be acknowledged to have, up to a certain point, good taste. He has the taste of ultimate refinement ; the tact that avoids the ugly ; the sense of proportion and fitness which teaches that we must renounce much if we would make our- selves and our surroundings harmonious. Nowhere is all that pertains to the external form of life so well understood as in these little cliques. In dress, in thought, in literature and art, the fashion of the hour is caught and reproduced with the faultless grace that is so much more often found in the artificial than in the real. Instinct and taste divorced from all serious responsibility have here nothing to do but to express whims and fancies, caprices and affectations, with the ease and elegance of finished breeding. About the atmosphere of such coteries, artificial though they be, there is a real charm, and those who come into it out of the larger air of the true London world,—that great exchange where all the best brains and hearts grown in the country find their true value,—those who pass occasionally from the larger circle to the smaller, axe the most capable of recognising this charm and appraising it at its worth. To them these little cliques are dainty toys. which only a highly complicated society could produce; which, being produced, are interesting and in their way instructive curiosities, but absolutely unrelated to any of the stern and tender realities of life at large. Such visitors humour the little world they drop into with a tact as perfect and more kindly than its own, and provided they do not drop into it too often, no one but themselves suspects that they are only humouring it.
But woe to the raw provincial of mediocre quality who is ushered straight into the little world of London without a period of acclimatisation in the larger. He may have brains and heart, but he is pretty sure to want taste and tact. He will know his own mind very well, but too little of any other mind to give him a chance of not disturbing the harmony of almost any circle to which he is newly admitted. He will obtrude the religious tenets of an unfashionable sect upon a drawing-room full of people who are agreed that all religion is out of date, or discuss the moral of a work of art with critics so "new" that they hardly know that moral standards have ever existed. In short, he will commit every kind of social solecism, and make his audience shudder. Still, so long as the chill of their shudder does not react upon him- self, he is strong, and may be said to have the best of it.
But in the moment—and the moment never fails to come— when be begins to understand the faintly amused smile of tolerance, or the stare of blank boredom with which his sallies as they grow familiar are received—in that moment his strength begins to be undermined. If he be wise he will retreat at once from the dainty circle in which he has planted his awkward country foot. But most often he is not wise. The fascination of this sham world has begun to tell upon him. He is no longer quite sure that he is right, and that it is wrong. He lowers his flag and tacks, and before he knows what he is doing, he has surrendered altogether. Henceforth there is nothing to fear from this kind of provincial. He has consented to be patronised, to forget his origin, and call himself a Londoner. But though he may never know it, his new associates do not admit him to fall equality. Behind his back they " explain " him and apologise for him. He may have the comfort of knowing, however, that he does for them what they cannot do for one another. He meets a real want. Among a set of people so carefully cultivated that they cannot possibly be ridiculous, but who—dehumanise them- selves as much as they can—still cannot get rid of the human inclination to laugh at somebody, the transformed provincial supplies a laughing-stock.
There are, however, a few general laws dominating the whole of human life, from the operation of which even the most ultra.-refined cliques cannot escape. And one of these is the law that finds popular expression in the terse saying, "extremes meet." The audacious question has sometimes crossed our mind, whether the sheltered artificiality of this little world might not, from the point of view of the larger 'cosmopolitanism of real London and real life, be fitly de- scribed as itself a kind of provincialism. Its representatives 'have, when we come to think about it, marks answering to those of all the recognised kinds of provincial. They have an accent of their own, a limited vocabulary, including many terms absolutely unintelligible to the common people of England, and excluding many which all the rest of the culti- vated world admits ; they have a code of manners to them- selves, and are very much struck by the grotesqueness of all other manners ; and finally they are ill at ease in any society outside their own, except that of that larger cosmopolitan world where provincials of all sorts are made at home in a mental and moral climate universal enough to snit all habits. This bold thought, once admitted into the mind, grows apace, and finds plenty to feed upon. For instance, there is the curious phenomenon of our day,—the plays and the novels specially affected by these little cliques—books which pretend to knOw the world and portray life more truly and exhaustively than it has ever been portrayed before—which nevertheless strike the majority of readers as depicting a very small province of life, and that from the point of view of one who has never travelled beyond it. These books are generally very exquisitely got up as to paper and bind- ing. And they almost always have one literary point in their favour. They are written by authors who have the tact not to be tedious. They are easy to read and easy to forget. If they were not so easy to forget, perhaps more people would before now have realised the sameness of tone and idea which are among the marks of what we would take courage to call their particular provincial origin. Another thing that makes for our theory is the tendency shown of late by this superfine little world to enter into an alliance, which may justly be called unholy, with a section of society that used to be considered quite typically provincial,—the world and the opinion of schoolgirldom. The kind of book we had, a moment ago, in view, and which we are quite sure will suggest itself immediately to all our readers without even committing ourselves to the invidious course of naming a particular example—the book of the "new woman "—ex- presses a body of opinion which is the unmistakable off- spring of a cross between the studied undenominationalisra of quintessential London culture and the crude inexperience of a smart school-girl. Of real life it knows nothing except what we are tempted to call a rather dirty corner ; none the less, because it bears the stamp of a little world of fashion, it pretends to dominate opinion and revolutionise literature. " Half-a-dozen coxcombs," says Vauvenargues, 'dined together and said, 'We are the world ; ' and the world believed them." It was certainly impudent of the coxcombs, but remarkably silly of the world.
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