242 



♦ KNOW^LKDGE ♦ 



[September 1, 1887. 



more to the liuman race than all the stalwart Porkers of 

 Brawnswick who ever ruled over Brentford, or than even 

 all the monarchs who have swayed the destinies of greater 

 nations— abased himself before that padded humbug. But 

 probably while Gorgius IV. was alive not five in ten saw 

 aught of degradation in such abasement, and not two in the 

 five would have ventured to express their feelings. Many 

 doubtless envied the Sheriff his right (let us hope he had 

 some right) to pocket the goblet out of which the First 

 Gentleman in Europe — alas, I have let the august cat out 

 of the awful bag I I should have said, " the august and 

 most gracious ruler of Brentford " — had taken, after his 

 fashion, more wine than was good for him.l 



The great man — most emphatically, I do not mean 

 Gorgius IV. — by an odd chance, sat down on the goblet, 

 and not only broke it into fragments, but ruined his own 

 coat-tails. Many laughed when they heard of this. But 

 it was not because they thought his purpose of consecrating 

 that goblet to future uselessness was an absurd one. They 

 only laughed, after the fashion of human nature, because 

 that purpose had failed. Many in those days — and, alas 1 

 I fear many are of the same mind now — would not have 

 thought it altogether absurd if Sir Walter Scott (again the 

 cat gets out of the b:ig — I should have said the Baron of 

 Bradwardiue) had made a pennon of his damaged swallow- 

 tails, and let them wave thereafter in the baronial halls of 

 Bishopsbridge in memory of the service in which they had 

 suflered injury. 



In our times manners and customs are no longer as they 

 were in the " good old days " of Brentford. Snobs there are 

 and always be; these poor (in .spirit) we have .always with 

 us. When we remember how a set of snobs (women, too, 

 whose degradation pains the mind more than any number 

 of masculine snobs) rushed in where a certain princess had 

 been eating cherry-pie, and seized the cherry-stones left by 

 her august lips upon the precious plate whence she had 

 eaten, and preserved those rather unpleasant objects as 

 sacred relics — we cannot speak of the Brentford people as 

 altogether regenerate even in these days. I have even heard 

 of American women who have not felt it degrading to pro- 

 claim that they have lost no chance of seeing — seeimj ! — the 

 niece of Gorgius IV., now Queen in Brentford. But at 

 least no one whom the world respects has ever debased 

 himself in our time, or in any British country, as did Brad- 

 wardine's B.aron when the century was yet young. 



A yet better sign is this, that those who in our time 

 reject the false loyalties which degrade no longer show by a 

 contrary fault how strongly the spring had been bent the 

 other way 1 Men are beginning to learn in my own loved 

 country, as the wiser have long learned in the United 

 States, that it is a weakness to be moved either one way or 

 another by titles and dignities, by wealth, by influence, or 

 by power. It begins to be recognised that one v.'ho shows 

 either subservience on the one hand, or discourtesy on the 

 other, towards those whom the silly cant of old times called 

 persons of rank (as if there were only one w.ay of ranking 

 people, and that way a foolish one), or whose conduct is in ant/ 

 respect whatsoever dHWexent towards them from what it would 

 be towards others possessing similar qualities, mental and 

 moral, has not yet reached the dignity of full-grown man- 

 hood. Such folk are not, indeed, to my judgment, rightly 

 described by Holmes as " children," in the sense in which 

 the savage is a child. They are rather the hobble-de-hoys 

 of civilisation. Their "your majesty," "my lord," and so 

 forth suit them very well, even as the " sir " with which the 

 stripling continues to address the pastors and masters of his 

 boyhood is appropriate enough to the stage of life through 

 which the lad is passing. It is better than discourtesy, pre- 

 cisely .as the formal politeness of tiie youth to those above him 



for the timein standingand experience is betterthan abrusque 

 manner or rude demeanour, and promises a more dignified 

 manhood. But it is only appropriate where there actually 

 is a difTerence of standing in the qualities constituting the 

 fulness of manhood ; and no man who respects the dignity 

 of manhood will recognise any such difference as between 

 the titled and the untitled, the wealthy and the poor, those 

 possessed of power and those who have no other sw.ay but 

 o'er themselves. When the stripling who has very rightly 

 shown a respectful demeanour towards his seniors becomes a 

 man, neither formal courtesy on the one hand, nor rudeness 

 on the other, becomes him. And what is true of individual 

 manhood is true also of the manhood of civilisation, which 

 has not yet, however, been fully reached in any country or 

 among any race either in the old world or in the new. 



There is something to be said, after all, in defence, if not 

 in favour of the form of loyalty which Americans, according 

 to Wendell Holmes, so little understand. It is the rudi- 

 mentary representative in our time of what was once a true 

 and very useful form of loyalty. The ancestors of Baron 

 Bradwardine, for instance, when they showed in council or 

 in field their loyal devotion either to the ruler of Haggis- 

 land or to their own immediate chieftain, showed loyalty to 

 their country or their clan. The faitliful service, even the 

 personal service, of king or chief, was often in those days 

 equivalent to faithful service in the common cause of all 

 who were led by him. The modern Baron of Bradwardine, 

 Sheriff of the capital city of Haggisland, no warrior but a 

 wizard, with his pen did not present a very dignified scene 

 when he s.at upon the goblet from which the i-oyal lips of 

 Brentford's king had drunk wine ; nor was there any value 

 for his country in what he thus endured in the royal 

 cause ; but the worthless loyalty he thus ingloriously dis- 

 played was derived from what had been true loyalty among 

 his predecessors. Being akin to a quality which when it 

 throve best led to deeds of heroism it could not be wholly 

 contemptible ; yet could it no more be compared with the 

 valuable loyalty of old days than the boot licking of a 

 modern courtier can ba compared with the devotion of a 

 Bayard to his country. 



It must be admitted, however, that the loyalty of our 

 times is sometimes hardly saved, even by its remote kinship 

 with true self-sacrificing loyalty — displayed towards a person 

 but in the cause of a people — from becoming absurd, if not 

 contemptible. The mastiff of the fable, whose neck showed 

 the mark of the collar, even when the collar was removed, 

 was not .altogether proud of the distinction. Perh.aps h.ad he 

 been a lady's spaniel he might have regarded it as a distinc- 

 tion : in that case when the wolf asked what it meant, 

 he might have replied (always providing the wolf had 

 not eaten him up first) that he was proud to we.ar his 

 mistress's collar, and could therefore have no objection to 

 bear the visible traces it had left on his neck. But then 

 the moral of the fable would have gone more strongly 

 against that spaniel than against ^^isop's mastiff. To the 

 latter the wolf simply objected that he preferred liberty and 

 hunger to slavery aud a full stomach : he would have 

 answered the spaniel more forcibly. 



The moral of the modified fable is not far to seek. 

 Americans who, like Dr. Wendell Holmes, somewhat con- 

 temptuously regard the mark of the collar on the British 

 mastifl^, may understand from the experience of their own 

 nation, diractly sprung from, nay, made hi/ the British race 

 bearing snc'a a mark, that it implies no real degradation of 

 character. It ls but skin deep, and has been shown again 

 and again to be consistent with faithful courage and steady 

 loyalty of the truest kind. Our British race knows in 

 America, as in the old home — and the nations know — that 

 personal loyalty, though no longer meaning quite what it 



