THE END.

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

Footnotes:

[1] An expression used to me by a learned Doctor of Oxford.

[2] The causes of this curious repulsion are inquired into elsewhere in this volume.

[3] The exact degree of blame due to Shelley is very difficult to determine. He had nothing to do with the suicide, though the separation was the first in a train of circumstances that led to it. It seems clear that Harriett did not desire the separation, and clear also that she did nothing to assert her rights. Shelley ought not to have left her, but he had not the patience to accept as permanent the consequences of a mistaken marriage.

[4] Lewes’s “Life of Goethe.”

[5] Only a poet can write of his private sorrows. In prose one cannot sing,—

“A dirge for her, the doubly dead, in that she died so young.”

[6] Schuyler’s “Peter the Great.”

[7] That valiant enemy of false pretensions, Mr. Punch, has often done good service in throwing ridicule on unreal distinctions. In “Punch’s Almanack” for 1882 I find the following exquisite conversation beneath one of George Du Maurier’s inimitable drawings:

[8] I am often amused by the indignant feelings of English journalists on this matter. Some French newspaper calls an Englishman a lord when he is not a lord, and our journalists are amazed at the incorrigible ignorance of the French. If Englishmen cared as little about titles they would be equally ignorant, and two or three other things are to be said in defence of the French journalist that English critics never take into account. They suppose that because Gladstone is commonly called Mr. a Frenchman ought to know that he cannot be a lord. That does not follow. In France a man may be called Monsieur and be a baron at the same time. A Frenchman may answer, “If Gladstone is not a lord, why do you call him one? English almanacs not only say that Gladstone is a lord, but that he is the very First Lord of the Treasury. Again, why am I not to speak of Sir Chamberlain? I have seen a printed letter to him beginning with ‘Sir,’ which is plain evidence that your ‘Sir’ is the equivalent of our Monsieur.” A Frenchman is surely not to be severely blamed if he is not aware that the First Lord of the Treasury is not a lord at all, and that a man who is called a “Sir” inside every letter addressed to him has no right to that title on the envelope.

[9] That of M. Léopold Double.

[10] I need hardly say that this is not intended as a description of poor men’s hospitality generally, but only of the effects of poverty on hospitality in certain cases. The point of the contrast lies in the difference between this uncomfortable hospitality, which a lover of pleasant human intercourse avoids, with the easy and agreeable hospitality that the very same people would probably have offered if they had possessed the conveniences of wealth.

[11] Italian, to me, seems Latin made natural.

[12] So far as the State and society generally are concerned; but there are private situations in which even a member of the State Church does not enjoy perfect religious liberty. Suppose the case (I am describing a real case) of a lady left a widow and in poverty. Her relations are wealthy Dissenters. They offer to provide for her handsomely if she will renounce the Church of England and join their own sect. Does she enjoy religious liberty? The answer depends upon the question whether she is able to earn her own living or not. If she is, she can secure religious freedom by incessant labor; if she is unable to earn her living she will have no religious freedom, although she belongs, in conscience, to the most powerful religion in the State. In the case I am thinking of, the lady had the honorable courage to open a little shop, and so remained a member of the Church of England; but her freedom was bought by labor and was therefore not the same thing as the best freedom, which is unembittered by sacrifice.

[13] The phrase adopted by Court journalists in speaking of such a conversion is, “The Princess has received instruction in the religion which she will adopt on her marriage,” or words to that effect, just as if different and mutually hostile religions were not more contradictory of each other than sciences, and as if a person could pass from one religion to another with no more twisting and wrenching of previous beliefs than he would incur in passing from botany to geology.

[14] The word “generally” is inserted here because women do apparently sometimes enjoy the infliction of undeserved pain on other creatures. They grace bull-fights with their presence, and will see horses disembowelled with apparent satisfaction. It may be doubted, too, whether the Empress of Austria has any compassion for the sufferings of a fox.

[15] I have purposely omitted from the text another cause for feminine indifference to the work of persecutors, but it may be mentioned incidentally. At certain times those women whose influence on persons in authority might have been effectively employed in favor of the oppressed were too frivolous or even too licentious for their thoughts to turn themselves to any such serious matter. This was the case in England under Charles II. The contrast between the occupations of such women as these and the sufferings of an earnest man has been aptly presented by Macaulay:—

“The ribaldry of Etherege and Wycherley was, in the presence and under the special sanction of the head of the Church, publicly recited by female lips in female ears, while the author of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ languished in a dungeon, for the crime of proclaiming the gospel to the poor.”

This is deplorable enough; but on the whole I do not think that the frivolity of light-minded women has been so harmful to noble causes as the readiness with which serious women place their immense influence at the service of constituted authorities, however wrongfully those authorities may act. Ecclesiastical authorities especially may quietly count upon this kind of support, and they always do so.

[16] Since this Essay was written I have met with the following passage in Her Majesty’s diary, which so accurately describes the consolatory influence of clergymen, and the natural desire of women for the consolation given by them, that I cannot refrain from quoting it. The Queen is speaking of her last interview with Dr. Norman Macleod:—

A little farther on in the same diary Her Majesty speaks of Dr. Macleod’s beneficial influence upon another lady:—

“He had likewise a marvellous power of winning people of all kinds, and of sympathizing with the highest and with the humblest, and of soothing and comforting the sick, the dying, the afflicted, the erring, and the doubting. A friend of mine told me that if she were in great trouble, or sorrow, or anxiety, Dr. Norman Macleod was the person she would wish to go to.”

The two points to be noted in these extracts are: first, the faith in a loving God who cares for each of His creatures individually (not acting only by general laws); and, secondly, the way in which the woman goes to the clergyman (whether in formal confession or confidential conversation) to hear consolatory doctrine from his lips in application to her own personal needs. The faith and the tendency are both so natural in women that they could only cease in consequence of the general and most improbable acceptance by women of the scientific doctrine that the Eternal Energy is invariably regular in its operations and inexorable, and that the priest has no clearer knowledge of its inscrutable nature than the layman.

[17] These quotations (I need hardly say) are from Macaulay’s History, Chapter III.

[18] The difference of interest as regards people of rank may be seen by a comparison of French and English newspapers. In an English paper, even on the Liberal side, you constantly meet with little paragraphs informing you that one titled person has gone to stay with another titled person; that some old titled lady is in poor health, or some young one going to be married; or that some gentleman of title has gone out in his yacht, or entertained friends to shoot grouse,—the reason being that English people like to hear about persons of title, however insignificant the news may be in itself. If paragraphs of the same kind were inserted in any serious French newspaper the subscribers would wonder how they got there, and what possible interest for the public there could be in the movements of mediocrities, who had nothing but titles to distinguish them.

[19] Since this Essay was written I have come upon a passage quoted from Henry Knyghton by Augustin Thierry in his “History of the Norman Conquest:”—

“It is not to be wondered at if the difference of nationality (between the Norman and Saxon races) produces a difference of conditions, or that there should result from it an excessive distrust of natural love; and that the separateness of blood should produce a broken confidence in mutual trust and affection.”

Now, the question suggests itself, whether the reason why Englishman shuns Englishman to-day may not be traceable, ultimately, to the state of feeling described by Knyghton as a result of the Norman Conquest. We must remember that the avoidance of English by English is quite peculiar to us; no other race exhibits the same peculiarity. It is therefore probably due to some very exceptional fact in English history. The Norman Conquest was exactly the exceptional fact we are in search of. The results of it may be traceable as follows:—

1. Norman and Saxon shun each other.

2. Norman has become aristocrat.

3. Would-be aristocrat (present representative of Norman) shuns possible plebeian (present representative of Saxon).

[20] It so happens that I am writing this Essay in a rough wooden hut of my own, which is in reality a most comfortable little building, though “stuffy luxury” is rigorously excluded.

[21] At present it is most inadequately represented by a few unimportant gifts. The donors have desired to break the rule of exclusion, and have succeeded so far, but that is all.

[22] These, of course, are only examples of vulgar patriotic ignorance. A few Frenchmen who have really seen what is best in English landscape are delighted with it; but the common impression about England is that it is an ugly country covered with usines, and on which the sun never shines.

[23] The French word univers has three or four distinct senses. It may mean all that exists, or it may mean the solar system, or it may mean the earth’s surface, in whole or in part. Voltaire said that Columbus, by simply looking at a map of our univers, had guessed that there must be another, that is, the western hemisphere. “Paris est la plus belle ville de l’univers” means simply that Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.

[24] A French critic recently observed that his countrymen knew little of the tragedy of “Macbeth” except the familiar line “To be or not to be, that is the question!”

[25] I never make a statement of this kind without remembering instances, even when it does not seem worth while to mention them particularly. It is not of much use to quote what one has heard in conversation, but here are two instances in print. Reclus, the French geographer, in “La Terre à Vol d’Oiseau,” gives a woodcut of the Houses of Parliament and calls it “L’Abbaye de Westminster.” The same error has even occurred in a French art periodical.

[26] Rodolphe, in “L’Honneur et l’Argent.”

[27] In the library at Towneley Hall in Lancashire.

[28] In Prosper Mérimée’s “Correspondence” he gives the following as the authentic text of the letter in which Lady Florence Paget announced her elopement with the last Marquis of Hastings to her father:—

“Dear Pa, as I knew you would never consent to my marriage with Lord Hastings, I was wedded to him to-day. I remain yours, etc.”

[29] For those who take an interest in such matters I may say that the last representative of the Plumptons died in France unmarried in 1749, and Plumpton Hall was barbarously pulled down by its purchaser, an ancestor of the present Earls of Harewood. The history of the family is very interesting, and the more so to me that it twice intermarried with my own. Dorothy Plumpton was a niece of the first Sir Stephen Hamerton.

[30] Sir Walter Scott had sympathy enough with the courtesy of old time to note its minutiæ very closely:—

“After inspecting the cavalry, Sir Everard again conducted his nephew to the library, where he produced a letter, carefully folded, surrounded by a little stripe of flox-silk, according to ancient form, and sealed with an accurate impression of the Waverley coat-of-arms. It was addressed, with great formality, ‘To Cosmo Comyne Bradwardine, Esq., of Bradwardine, at his principal mansion of Tully-Veolan, in Perthshire, North Britain. These—by the hands of Captain Edward Waverley, nephew of Sir Everard Waverley, of Waverley-Honour, Bart.’”—Waverley, chap. vi.

I had not this passage in mind when writing the text of this Essay, but the reader will notice how closely it confirms what I have said about deliberation and care to secure a fair impression of the seal.

[31] A very odd but very real objection to the employment of these missives is that the receiver does not always know how to open them, and may burn them unread. I remember sending a short letter in this shape from France to an English lady. She destroyed my letter without opening it; and I got for answer that “if it was a French custom to send blank post-cards she did not know what could be the signification of it.” Such was the result of a well-meant attempt to avoid the non-courteous post-card!

[32] Besides which, in the case of a French friend, you are sure to have notice of such events by printed lettres de faire part.

[33] I need hardly say that there has been immense improvement in this respect, and that such descriptions have no application to the Lancashire of to-day; indeed, they were never true, in that extreme degree, of Lancashire generally, but only of certain small localities which were at one time like spots of local disease on a generally vigorous body.

[34] Littré derives corvée from the Low-Latin corrogata, from the Latin cum and rogare.