In the Matter of Aristocracy
Grant Allen
[Chapter II from the book, Post-Prandial
Philosophy,
published 1894 in London by Chatto & Windus]
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 hima superiority as of fine porcelain to common claythat
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 mediæval 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 mediæval
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 againa 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 fisherhe preserves
the three simplest and commonest barbaric functions. He is not a
practiser of any civilised or civilising arta 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 gamelions, elephants, buffalo. His one task is to killeither
his kind or his quarry.
Observe, too, the essentially barbaric nature of the gentleman's homehis
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 themfor the sake of their wild life,
their heather and bracken, their fresh keen air, their boundless
horizonbut 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 militaryknight 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 mediæval
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 womenespecially 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 mediæval costumes, too childish for the civilised and
cultivated commoner.
Government by aristocrats is thus government by the mentally and
morally inferior. And yeta 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!
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