Post-Prandial Philosophy

2. In The Matter Of Aristocracy

Aristocracies, as a rule, all the world over, consist, and have always

consisted, of barbaric conquerors or their descendants, who remain to

the last, on the average of instances, at a lower grade of civilisation

and morals than the democracy they live among.

I know this view is to some extent opposed to the common ideas of people

at large (and especially of that particular European people which

"dearly loves a lord") as to the relative position of aristocracies and

democracies in the sliding scale of human development. There is a common

though wholly unfounded belief knocking about the world, that the

aristocrat is better in intelligence, in culture, in arts, in manners,

than the ordinary plebeian. The fact is, being, like all barbarians, a

boastful creature, he has gone on so long asserting his own profound

superiority by birth to the world around him--a superiority as of fine

porcelain to common clay--that the world around him has at last actually

begun to accept him at his own valuation. Most English people in

particular think that a lord is born a better judge of pictures and

wines and books and deportment than the human average of us. But history

shows us the exact opposite. It is a plain historical fact, provable by

simple enumeration, that almost all the aristocracies the world has ever

known have taken their rise in the conquest of civilised and cultivated

races by barbaric invaders; and that the barbaric invaders have seldom

or never learned the practical arts and handicrafts which are the

civilising element in the life of the conquered people around them.

To begin with the aristocracies best known to most of us, the noble

families of modern and medi*** Europe sprang, as a whole, from the

Teutonic invasion of the Roman Empire. In Italy, it was the Lombards and

the Goths who formed the bulk of the great ruling families; all the

well-known aristocratic names of medi*** Italy are without exception

Teutonic. In Gaul it was the rude Frank who gave the aristocratic

element to the mixed nationality, while it was the civilised and

cultivated Romano-Celtic provincial who became, by fate, the mere

_roturier_. The great revolution, it has been well said, was, ethnically

speaking, nothing more than the revolt of the Celtic against the

Teutonic fraction; and, one might add also, the revolt of the civilised

Romanised serf against the barbaric _seigneur_. In Spain, the hidalgo is

just the _hi d'al Go_, the son of the Goth, the descendant of those rude

Visigothic conquerors who broke down the old civilisation of Iberian and

Romanised Hispania. And so on throughout. All over Europe, if you care

to look close, you will find the aristocrat was the son of the intrusive

barbarian; the democrat was the son of the old civilised and educated

autochthonous people.

It is just the same elsewhere, wherever we turn. Take Greece, for

example. Its most aristocratic state was undoubtedly Sparta, where a

handful of essentially barbaric Dorians held in check a much larger and

Helotised population of higher original civilisation. Take the East: the

Persian was a wild mountain adventurer who imposed himself as an

aristocrat upon the far more cultivated Babylonian, Assyrian, and

Egyptian. The same sort of thing had happened earlier in time in

Babylonia and Assyria themselves, where barbaric conquerors had

similarly imposed themselves upon the first known historical

civilisations. Take India under the Moguls, once more; the aristocracy

of the time consisted of the rude Mahommedan Tartar, who lorded it over

the ancient enchorial culture of Rajpoot and Brahmin. Take China: the

same thing over again--a Tartar horde imposing its savage rule over the

most ancient civilised people of Asia. Take England: its aristocracy at

different times has consisted of the various barbaric invaders, first

the Anglo-Saxon (if I must use that hateful and misleading word)--a

pirate from Sleswick; then the Dane, another pirate from Denmark direct;

then the Norman, a yet younger Danish pirate, with a thin veneer of

early French culture, who came over from Normandy to better himself

after just two generations of Christian apprenticeship. Go where you

will, it matters not where you look; from the Aztec in Mexico to the

Turk at Constantinople or the Arab in North Africa, the aristocrat

belongs invariably to a lower race than the civilised people whom he has

conquered and subjugated.

"That may be true, perhaps," you object, "as to the remote historical

origin of aristocracies; but surely the aristocrat of later generations

has acquired all the science, all the art, all the polish of the people

he lives amongst. He is the flower of their civilisation." Don't you

believe it! There isn't a word of truth in it. From first to last the

aristocrat remains, what Matthew Arnold so justly called him, a

barbarian. I often wonder, indeed, whether Arnold himself really

recognised the literal and actual truth of his own brilliant

generalisation. For the aristocratic ideas and the aristocratic pursuits

remain to the very end essentially barbaric. The "gentleman" never soils

his high-born hands with dirty work; in other words, he holds himself

severely aloof from the trades and handicrafts which constitute

civilisation. The arts that train and educate hand, eye, and brain he

ignorantly despises. In the early middle ages he did not even condescend

to read and write, those inferior accomplishments being badges of

serfdom. If you look close at the "occupations of a gentleman" in the

present day, you will find they are all of purely barbaric character.

They descend to us direct from the semi-savage invaders who overthrew

the structure of the Roman empire, and replaced its civilised

organisation by the military and barbaric system of feudalism. The

"gentleman" is above all things a fighter, a hunter, a fisher--he

preserves the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is

_not_ a practiser of any civilised or civilising art--a craftsman, a

maker, a worker in metal, in stone, in textile fabrics, in pottery.

These are the things that constitute civilisation; but the aristocrat

does none of them; in the famous words of one who now loves to mix with

English gentlemen, "he toils not, neither does he spin." The things he

_may_ do are, to fight by sea and land, like his ancestor the Goth and

his ancestor the Viking; to slay pheasant and partridge, like his

predatory forefathers; to fish for salmon in the Highlands; to hunt the

fox, to sail the yacht, to scour the earth in search of great

game--lions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to kill--either his

kind or his quarry.

Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman's

home--his trappings, his distinctive marks, his surroundings, his

titles. He lives by choice in the wildest country, like his skin-clad

ancestors, demanding only that there be game and foxes and fish for his

delectation. He loves the moors, the wolds, the fens, the braes, the

Highlands, not as the painter, the naturalist, or the searcher after

beauty of scenery loves them--for the sake of their wild life, their

heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless horizon--but

for the sake of the thoroughly barbarous existence he and his dogs and

his gillies can lead in them. The fact is, neither he nor his ancestors

have ever been really civilised. Barbarians in the midst of an

industrial community, they have lived their own life of slaying and

playing, untouched by the culture of the world below them. Knights in

the middle ages, squires in the eighteenth century, they have never

received a tincture of the civilising arts and crafts and industries;

they have fought and fished and hunted in uninterrupted succession since

the days when wild in woods the noble savage ran, to the days when they

pay extravagant rents for Scottish grouse moors. Their very titles are

barbaric and military--knight and earl and marquis and duke, early

crystallised names for leaders in war or protectors of the frontier.

Their crests and coats of arms are but the totems of their savage

predecessors, afterwards utilised by medi*** blacksmiths as

distinguishing marks for the summit of a helmet. They decorate their

halls with savage trophies of the chase, like the Zulu or the Red

Indian; they hang up captured arms and looted Chinese jars from the

Summer Palace in their semi-civilised drawing-rooms. They love to be

surrounded by grooms and gamekeepers and other barbaric retainers; they

pass their lives in the midst of serfs; their views about the position

and rights of women--especially the women of the "lower orders"--are

frankly African. They share the sentiments of Achilles as to the

individuality of Chryseis and Briseis.

Such is the actual aristocrat, as we now behold him. Thus, living his

own barbarous life in the midst of a civilised community of workers and

artists and thinkers and craftsmen, with whom he seldom mingles, and

with whom he has nothing in common, this chartered relic of worse days

preserves from first to last many painful traits of the low moral and

social ideas of his ancestors, from which he has never varied. He

represents most of all, in the modern world, the surviving savage. His

love of gewgaws, of titles, of uniform, of dress, of feathers, of

decorations, of Highland kilts, and stars and garters, is but one

external symbol of his lower grade of mental and moral status. All over

Europe, the truly civilised classes have gone on progressing by the

practice of peaceful arts from generation to generation; but the

aristocrat has stood still at the same half-savage level, a hunter and

fighter, an orgiastic roysterer, a killer of wild boars and wearer of

absurd medi*** costumes, too childish for the civilised and cultivated

commoner.

Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and morally

inferior. And yet--a Bill for giving at last some scant measure of

self-government to persecuted Ireland has to run the gauntlet, in our

nineteenth-century England, of an irresponsible House of hereditary

barbarians!