Tailor Blood and Aristocratic Fiction

Would Meredith Have Made the Aristocracy so Amusing if he had Known More About Them?

FRANK MOORE COLBY

ALTHOUGH, as is well known, tailoring ran for three generations in the family of George Meredith, it would seem from a recent biography that his own blood was nearly free from it at the age of two. At that age when another boy (aged four) came to visit him, he showed, according to his biographer, such a marked hauteur of manner that the other boy left the house, never to return. The aristocratic element in the blood had, he thinks, even then overcome the tailor corpuscles.

Though hauteur at the age of two seems to this biographer incompatible with tailor origin, he does not on that account reject the tailor origin. He does not, like other writers on Meredith, invent a noble father for Meredith, or omit his birth altogether, or call it "mysterious", or dismiss it with the usual gasp: "Born of a tailor; who would have thought it!" On the contrary, he decides to make the best of this whole bad tailor business. They were fashionable tailors, at any rate, he says, and they may have fitted clothes to admirals in the Royal Navy; and the grandfather, the 'Great Mel', had associated on equal terms with county families — was quite the fine gentleman, indeed; and George had inherited the gentleman part of this grandfather, while escaping every trace of the tailor portion.

I am not a syndicalist and I have no especial sympathy with a tailor soviet. I certainly should no more care to live under a tailor dictatorship than under that of any other labor union. But if the tailor revolution had to some, and the bombs were flying and the streets flowing with the blood of customers, I should not confrom the infuriated mob the whereabouts of certain writers on George Meredith. I should in fact be rather glad to point the way. There has been a kind of writing on the tailor antecedents of that novelist which can never be redressed by the peaceful methods of literary criticism. What I have above cited indicates imperfectly what I mean. It is not so bad as most of it.

A reasonable view of the relation between tailoring and aristocracy has been quite beyond the power' of Meredith commentators—most of them having gone all to gooseflesh at the bare thought of it. And yet Meredith could never have written about upper classes as he did, if he had not been the son of a tailor. Only as the son of a tailor could he have imagined so many of those radiant beings among the daughters of earls. As the son of an earl, he would probably have imagined them among the daughters of tailors. At all events, we should not find them among the daughters of earls in any such proportion as we now find them in his novels. Tailor-distance from an aristocracy in our day is the only safe distance for purposes of enchantment.

And I wonder if our own "best society" would not have stood a better chance in fiction if American novelists had been sons of tailors. Not of course that tailor birth would have made up for the lack of certain other qualities that Meredith possessed, but it might at least have helped a little.

The Blight of the Upper Class

THERE has never been enough illusion about our upper class, especially among the talented. In fact the more talented people are, the less enthusiastic they seem to be about our upper class. Gifted novelists who know our upper class will die in exile rather than go on knowing it. Bare acquaintance with our upper class drove Henry James from this country for ever; better acquaintance with it made him the most loyal subject of the British Crown. Contact with our upper classes hurled Mrs. Wharton's body to Paris and her mind into the mountains of Vermont. A gifted writer who has once met the better sort of people in New York will often remain for ever after rooted in the Middle Ages. Nothing seems to kill so quickly all enthusiasm for our upper class as contact with it. Even the chance of contact checks the flow of fancy.

It is possible that a reallyinteresting figure in our upper class could be created only in the backwoods by a writer of great talent who had never once emerged. But tailor-distance from our upper class might have done something. It is conceivable that a glamour might be cast over our leading families at tailor-distance, by a strong novelist who was naturally good at glamour-casting. A cook could not write a good American novel of caste, being in too close contact with the family, but a tailor might.

No American novelist of the first rank, I believe, has evei taken American social distinctions with a tailor seriousness. Something of a tailor seriousness in that matter will be found of course among many good American story-writers, but they are not of the highest rank. Tailor-birth, for example, would hardly have enabled the late Richard Harding Davis to improve on his New York heroes and heroines— probably would not have resulted in any change at all. Tailor-birth would not have enabled Mr. Robert W. Chambers to throw more of a glamour over the golden few than he has thrown without it. But the fiction of wellbred people in this country has never had the benefit of that Meredith combination of tailor-birth and great talent.

The Howard Cushing Memorial at Newport

THE Howard Cushing Memorial Gallery, recently dedicated at Newport is, as far as we know, the first American-memorial of this character to a painter. As the inscription over the door tells the passer-by, "This building was erected by the friends of Howard Gardiner Cushing, who remember with affection the joy of his companionship, and his power to make them see, as he saw, the beautiful things of life".

Particularly happy is the way in which this building, which is the work of Delano and Aldrion, architects, combines a gallery, where a number of Mr. Cushing's own paintings will be permanently shown, with a larger general Exhibition Room. In the first, the individual charm and atmosphere of Mr. Cushing's talent is felt in the same manner as one feels the spirit of Ingres in the little museum at Montauban, or the quality of our own St. Gaudens in the memorial gallery at his home in Windsor, Vermont. In the second and larger gallery will be shown, throughout the year, the exhibitions organized by the energetic and flourishing Art Association of Newport. It opened recently with a collection of works of the American painters, who, from Gilbert Stewart, Sully and Trumbull to William Hunt and John LaFarge, lived and worked in Newport, R. I. This is now being followed by a loan exhibition of objects of art lent by various well-known collectors among Newport's residents. The weekly lectures, classes in art and other gatherings of the kind, which will be held throughout the year by the Art Association, will also take place in this second gallery.

(Continued on page 114)

(Continued from page 77)

Mr. Howells as a Tailor

SUPPOSE Mr. Howell's had been tailor-born while remaining equally gifted, for example. He might have turned on that upper class of Boston a kindling and imaginative eye. He might have imagined Meredithian aristocrats in Boston—interesting people who did as they pleased. High birth in Boston need not have been the unpleasant thing he describes—making everybody feel what a blessing it is to be born low and elsewhere. High birth in Boston, seen through the social haze of tailordistance, might have seemed to him desirable. At all events he would not have learned that every well-bred Boston person must be undesirable. He would not have made it a law of his fiction that, whereas interesting people who do as they please are imaginable, they are not even by the wildest riot of the fancy ever to be placed among the upper class of Boston. Tailoring would have mitigated these rigorous results of a too close observation.

Henry James, born in a Harlem tailor-shop and never straying far away, Henry James, with three tailor ancestors looking down from the walls upon him, might have imagined five divinely complicated women east of Central Park,— at least he would not have absolutely refused even to try, on the ground that they were unimaginable. Henry James might have worked wonders of aristocratic subtlety even here, had he remained innocent enough, and tailoring was one of the few remaining guarantees of social innocence.

I do not say that glorious creatures like Laura Middleton, or Diana, or Aminta, or the other goddesses of George Meredith could have been freely sprinkled in our upper class by any imagination short of Meredith's, even with Meredith's three-fold tailor start. But I do say that much might have been done for our upper class in fiction by an imagination raised to the third tailor-power by inheritance. It never has had this supreme literary chance. What are known as social advantages in this country have been fatal to anything like a poetic conception of our upper class. Never show a gifted novelist above the basement stairs, if you wish him to retain an exciting sense of social altitudes. Keep the better sort of literary men away from anybody of the slightest social importance, if you wish any glamour to be cast. Aristocracies of fiction will never be perceived so long as the eyes are open.

Despite the confusion of classes in our time when you never can guess what people will be like from the sort of families they are found in, Meredith could still believe that Blood will tell And he believed blood told delightfully and in the most minute detail. He believed that aristocratic noses were found on women of the highest class instead of belonging as they generally do to shop girls. He believed in a noble bear, ing peculiar to lords which is really common to policemen. He imagined in earls the magnificent and aristocratic poise and the beauty of Italian day labourers. He believed duchesses walked like duchesses, when, if we may judge from photographs, they must, rather have tumbled around; and he believed that people were as stately as he thought they ought to be when he looked at the dignified and imposing castles that they lived in.

And wit ran in direct ratio to the good birth of his characters, and not inversely. That was the final touch of tailor sublimity. Meredith not only made aristocrats witty in their homes; he made polite society dine out wittily Brilliant talk, such as is carried on by Jews, and tolerated nowhere in the best society, was attributed by Meredith to the class of people by whom the dullest things in the world have been said and about whom the dullest books in the world have been written.

In spite of the Saturday Review, and parliamentary speeches, and the London Times, and Justin McCarthy's Reminiscences, and the vast volume of aristocratic British memoirs published by the score every year in Meredith's lifetime and our own, he created by sheer force of genius, guided by an inherited inclination, the illusion that the very highest families in England could be amusing in their homes. Meredith successfully embodied such a vision of aristocracy as nowadays can be confidently entertained only by three old maids washing dishes in a farm house. It is absurd to imagine, as the biographer does, whom I have quoted at the beginning of this article, that there was no tailor in the blood.

In the present muddle of a changing social order, with the upper class being slowly educated by the classes below, and getting the little wit it has from them, and all the clever people in one class flying immediately into another, up or down, with blood telling the wrong story and usually rather a dull one; with people everywhere turning out to be just what they ought not to be from their antecedents and surroundings, and with the most remarkable of public characters commonly the most deadly objects to the private gaze—in these conditions of our generation, a feat such as Meredith achieved becomes increasingly difficult. It requires, at the very least, the advantage of a tailor ancestry.