Socially, I do not know whether Mr. Greg has been led to consider the
extent to which artificial desires, expensive fashions, and conventional
necessities created by wealth, interfere with freedom of intercourse and
general happiness. The _Saturday Review_ says:
"All classes of Her Majesty's respectable subjects are always doing
their best to keep up appearances, and a very hard struggle many of us
make of it. Thus a mansion in Belgrave Square ought to mean a corpulent
hall-porter, a couple of gigantic footmen, a butler and an under-butler
at the very least, if the owner professes to live op to his social
dignities. If our house is in Baker or Wimpole street, we must certainly
have a manservant in sombre raiment to open our door, with a hobbledehoy
or a buttons to run his superior's messages. In the smart, although
somewhat dismal, small squares in South Kensington and the Western
suburbs, the parlourmaid must wear the freshest of ribbons and trimmest
of bows, and be resplendent in starch and clean coloured muslins. So it
goes on, as we run down the gamut of the social scale; our ostentatious
expenditure must be in harmony throughout with the stuccoed facade
behind which we live, or the staff of domestics we parade. We are aware,
of course, as our incomes for the most part are limited, and as we are
all of us upon our mettle in the battle of life that we must pinch
somewhere if appearances are to be kept up. We do what we can in secret
towards balancing the budget. We retrench on our charities, save on our
coals, screw on our cabs, drink the sourest of Bordeaux instead of more
generous vintages, dispense with the cream which makes tea palatable,
and systematically sacrifice substantial comforts that we may swagger
successfully in the face of a critical and carping society. But with
the most of us if our position is an anxious one; it is of our own
making and if we dared to be eccentrically rational it might be very
tolerable."
Nor is this the worst. The worst is the exclusion from society of the
people who do not choose to torture and degrade themselves in order to
keep up appearances and who are probably the best people of all. The
interference of wealth and its exigencies with social enjoyment is I
suspect a heavy set off against squirearchical patronage of intellect
and art.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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