is a sham with them: they have drill and etiquet
instead of manners, fashions instead of tastes, small
talk instead of intercourse. Everything that
is special to them as distinguished from workers is
a sham: when you get down to the real element
in them, good or bad, you find that it is something
that is common to them and to all civilized mankind.
The reason that this isnt as clear to other workmen
who come among them as it is to me is that most workmen
share their ignorance of the things they affect superiority
in. Poor Jackson, whom you all call the Yankee
cad, and who is not a cad at all in his proper place
among the engineers at our works, believes in the
sham refinements he sees around him at the at-homes
he is so fond of. He has no art in him—no
trained ear for music or for fine diction, no trained
eye for pictures and colors and buildings, no cultivated
sense of dignified movement, gesture, and manner.
But he knows what fashionable London listens to and
looks at, and how it talks and behaves; and he makes
that his standard, and sets down what is different
from it as vulgar. Now the difference between
me and him is that I got an artistic training by accident
when I was young, and had the natural turn to profit
by it. Before I ever saw a West End Londoner
I knew beautiful from ugly, rare from common, in music,
speech, costume, and gesture; for in my father’s
operatic and theatrical companies there did come now
and then, among the crowd of thirdraters, a dancer,
an actor, a scenepainter, a singer, or a bandsman
or conductor who was a fine artist. Consequently,
I was not to be taken in like Jackson by made-up faces,
trashy pictures, drawling and lounging and strutting
and tailoring, drawing-room singing and drawing-room
dancing, any more than by bad ventilation and unwholesome
hours and food, not to mention polite dram drinking,
and the round of cruelties they call sport. I
found that the moment I refused to accept the habits
of the rich as standards of refinement and propriety,
the whole illusion of their superiority vanished at
once. When I married Marian I was false to my
class. I had a sort of idea that my early training
had accustomed me to a degree of artistic culture
that I could not easily find in a working girl, and
that would be quite natural to Marian. I soon
found that she had the keenest sense of what was ladylike,
and no sense of what was beautiful at all. A
drawing, a photograph, or an engraving sensibly framed
without a white mount round it to spoil it pained
her as much as my wrists without cuffs on them.
No mill girl could have been less in sympathy with
me on the very points for which I had preferred her
to the mill girls. The end of it was that I felt
that love had made me do a thoroughly vulgar thing—marry
beneath me. These aristocratic idle gentlemen
will never be shamed out of their laziness and low-mindedness
until the democratic working gentlemen refuse to associate
with them instead of running after them and licking