THE ROYAL WEDDING.
THE interest of the Duke of Albany's Wedding consists, for us, in the interest of the public in it. We have rather a special wish that this particular Prince should be fortunate in his marriage, and, indeed, in all ways, because we estimate, it may be even too highly, the special service he performs in a country like this, in showing the community that a man may be born a Prince, and yet have intellectual interests ; may be a Royal Duke, yet not care particularly for reviews and ceremo- nials ; may be at the head of society, yet not addicted to racing horses, hunting animals, or killing small birds,—that, in fact, life at the top of the world is practicable without the devotion of one-half of it to the pursuits of the gamekeeper, the whip, and the horsey man. A Prince who can be a stadent is, among our many-acred barbarians, who " know only one language, and never open a book," a very useful being, if only as showing that it is possible to be great, yet not a Squire. But, wishing him all happiness, with a cordiality that is not conventional, the litera- ture just now publishing about him none the less strikes as as preposterous. All those lengthy descriptions of the arrivals and departures of Royalties, male and female, and their in- cidents, of processions and feastings, of visitors and. brides- maids, of carriages and formalities, strike us, we confess, as at once incurably vulgar and insufferably tedious. Not that we mean to say there is the least harm in all the ceremonials. Some ceremony is expedient at weddings, if only to impress bride and bridgroom with the notion that marriage is im- portant; and if Royal people think it part of their dignity to make their weddings tedious pageants, there is no reason to object. The people like them all the better. It is the descrip- tions of the ceremonies, not the ceremonies themselves, which offend us, or rather bewilder us with speculations as to the real cause of the public demand for them. For we do not doubt that the demand is genuine ; that the public really wishes for all the details it gets, and that it reads all those dreary columns about the arrival of the Princess Helen and the wed- ding festivities, and the dresses of the bride and her bridesmaids, and the behaviour of everybody concerned, with a distinct gusto. Newspaper managers make few mistakes about public wants, and we no more doubt that special reports of a Royal wedding pay, than we doubt that if the Times omitted all that abraca- dabra headed " Sporting Intelligence," its circulation would im- mediately fall off. The fact of a general or, at least, of a wide- spread interest in the reports is clear, but not the reason for the fact. Why do all these people care so very much to read things which are not only tedious in themselves, but which they themselves would, under other circumstances, think tedious. The answer given in almost all the London papers on Wednes-
day is that the people are so devoted to the Royal Family, so glad with its griefs and sad with its joys, that any account of incidents affecting it attracts and interests them; but that reply is, at the best, only conventionally true. The people like the Princes well enough, when they are not asking for appanages ; but they can be pleased at a Royal marriage without wanting to be informed about all the ceremonial detail of the wedding, at a length which would afford space for the report of a great Parliamentary debate. The people are very loyal to the Sovereign, and have a certain separate feeling about the next heir, but we do not believe in the existence of loyalty in any true sense towards the whole Royal Family, which is praised and satirised in conversation like any other praminent clan. Let any member of the Family do or say anything decidedly un- popular, and then read the comments in papers outside London, and he will know what the " loyalty " amounts to. Nor do we think that the unfavourable answer—Thackeray's answer,—that the motive of the interest taken is snobbishness, is entirely true. There is snobbishness enough in the English, no doubt, and snob- bishness towards Princes, as witness the order of Sir E. Watkin that the passengers from France should cross the Channel in an inferior boat, which proved to be dangerously out of order, in order that the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh should have the best boat to themselves ; but they do not read long columns of inane descriptions out of snobbishness. They do not expect to be noticed by Prince Leopold or Princess Helen because they read those things, nor does any social etiquette compel them to bore them- selves with accounts they do not want. They read for their own pleasure, or to satisfy their own curiosity ; and we believe that their ultimate motive includes both. The English people are exceedingly pleased with any ceremonial or pageant which is at once customary and splendid. They have a pleasure in it as great as many men have in glowing pictures or bright stage-scenes, a sense of colour and movement and beauty, foreign to the orderly sombreness of their own lives, and enjoyable even through description. They like all that magnificence, just as they like descriptions of jewels, or scenes in the " Arabian Nights," or as many men like accounts of almost fabulous riches, or of magnificent estates. Being imaginative, though with concrete imaginations, and entirely devoid of envy — Eng- lish envy is really jealousy, and only felt where competi- tion is possible—they smack their lips over narratives of what seems to them unrivalled brightness and splendour and gaiety, such as they themselves will never know. They love the pro- fusion and the ordered pomp and the glitter for themselves, and care nothing, as Continentals do, for the inequalities in con- dition which those splendours make so manifest. They would be just as well pleased if the Princes were foreigners, and they would never see them again, provided that the show were of the domestic and usual kind necessary to rouse the secondary source of interest required to give piquancy to the first. That secondary interest is curiosity to see whether they themselves are right, whether their own idea of the becoming, and stately, and magnificent is also the idea of their social chiefs. They cannot test that in unusual scenes, but they can in marriages, christenings, and funerals, and they, there- fore, study details on such occasions with a perfect enjoyment. They are not prepared to alter their ideas on important matters because of Princes' ideas. If Prince Leopold happened to be an Agnostic of the pronounced type, which rejects all reli- gious ceremonials at weddings, they would not all go and get married by the Registrar, or any considerable proportion of them. They would simply pronounce him either very much in the wrong or very eccentric, and in neither case would imitate his example. But it being understood that everything is to be done and said and worn according to custom and the highest laws of etiquette, they want to see if they know exactly what that custom is and those laws are. When they have read the reports and compared them, and realised to themselves precisely what they mean, then they feel that they know, on the highest authority, exactly what is " proper " on such occasions, and they are pleased with that knowledge. Their desire is to see a ceremonial which they all have seen per- formed in other ways, performed in what they have a right to think the completest and most perfect way. The slightest departure from usage would be commented on, and that un- favourably, unless it were obviously intentional ; and then it would be discussed on its merits with a zest such as hardly any other occurrence would excite.
This feeling, that there is a social norm, or ultimate law of the Becoming, and that the highest know it best, exists among Englishmen to a degree not found among any other people, and tends more than any other cause to that sameness in manners, in usages, and even in dress, which is gradually per- vading the country. Everybody wants to do " the right thing," and looks to the class next above for guidance as to the right thing, till all separateness in the manners, and ways, and dress of different classes tends to disappear, in favour of habits which may one day, as Mr. J. S. Mill feared they would, become in- exorable. " Costume " has nearly vanished, " customs " are given up one by one, and every peculiarity of life, if it be only a way of getting fed like Wordsworth's, is concealed, as if it were discreditable to those who practise it. No one will wear a peculiar dress, unless it be a uniform, or deviate from the usual in any ceremonial, be it a wedding, or a funeral, or a dinner ; and a single standard of manners becomes the only one to be endured without hostile remark. It is true that want of means still enforces differences, the normal rule being often a very costly rule; but the differences are only of practice, not of the ideal to which the practices should tend. On that all substantially agree, to the indefinite loss of social variety ; and it is because they agree that they are so interested in high-class ceremonial, the accounts of which serve to correct and vivify the standard in their own minds of what is socially " right." The whole people is intent, consciously or unconsciously, on effacing individualism in manners, and naturally finds a help in that work from studying what it accepts as models of the universal " way," hereafter to be adopted, under pain of ostracism. We do not know that the process is altogether bad, and incline to think that Mr. Mill missed its very great com- pensating advantages. It is, perhaps, the quickest and gentlest method by which uncivilised customs or bad customs could be got rid of; and they affect much larger classes than the good, but separate, customs do. A population in black broad-cloth is a sombre population, much of it in ill-fitting garments, and much looking ill at ease; but the desire to be dressed alike, which extinguishes variety, extinguishes also filthy clothes, bare feet, and indecorum. When the Czars wished to abolish beards, they exiled men who wore them. In England, for the same object, the Princes would shave. That dialects should disappear, is, perhaps, to be regretted ; but the use of the " soft English " very often implies also abstinence from bad language and blasphemous expressions. Same- ness is a bad thing, but the sameness which arises from an impression that the cultivated know best, has, at least, the advantage of altering the uncultivated ideal. At all events, for good or for evil, the process is going on ; and while it goes on, the way of performing customary ceremonies, adopted by those who are understood both to know the " right " manner, and to wish to adhere to it, will be, to the great body of the people, matter of keen interest. They do not want to know how a Princess dresses for a voyage out of snobbishness, or, at all events, out of that alone ; but from a belief that the Princess will know accurately what it is "becoming" under those cir- cumstances to wear, and a desire to conform to that.
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