The Middle-Class

...The New York Times, in its comment upon the Harper article, puts the case very well when it tells us that uthe state of being in the middle of everything does not excite the admiration of present-day society...

...In a country such as America, where land, within the memory of men still living, has been to be had for the fencing and clearing, land (save in the South, and when slavery allowed it to be exploited like some great open-air factory) has never implied social position...

...If we turn to literature for its reflections of current modes of thought, it will be easy to multiply instances of this new contempt for the class that has contributed to so much good fiction in the past...

...William Michael Rossetti recalls the evenings spent round the modest parental hearth where poets, fellow professors, and patriots, whose rank ranged from prince to image seller, met nightly to prophesy United Italy, and discourse on Dante, sustained by a common ideal that obliterated caste...

...A little of the "guid conceit of oursels" which the Scotch preacher prayed heaven to send upon his congregation, would be no bad thing at the present crisis...

...We may go further still...

...These people have neither the talent to make the things they care for most the material of a livelihood, nor the resolution to bury them out of sight, and keep them for private delectation...

...43O THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 1926 THE MIDDLE-CLASS A PLEA FOR SELF-CONCEIT By HENRY LONGAN STUART THIRTY or even twenty years ago, the thought that America would find itself with a class upon its hands in any way reproducing the "poor gentlefolk" of Europe, would have seemed an absurdity...

...Waldo Frank's last novel, the process of disillusionment is carried still further...

...Culture is static...

...It is this constant movement that has earned American contacts in the near past the reputation of being fortuitous and superficial affairs, and which convinced novelists such as Henry James, whose business was the observation of intimate reactions of one human being on another, that the thing could not be done in America...

...The defenses which they have erected against tragedy become so many obstacles to our interest...

...At present it seems to be a class adrift...

...And gradually, as things are always considered in proportion to what they cost, an immense respect grew up for the educated man or woman, quite apart from what the results might be likely to be in material reward...

...You can nave your universities for me.'5 In Dark Laughter we are given a newspaper man who breaks away from respectability and white-collardom to find the zest for life of which he is balked as handworker in a factory and boon companion of a drunken and disreputable little comrade...

...and secondly, from whence comes the blighting wind that blows upon it today...

...We don't accept," says Mr...

...Men who had even a little money laid by thought an education for their children a good investment...

...A young white girl, sick of the respect and protection that has surrounded her in a small southern town, seeks her affinity in the Negro quarter...

...No matter how far away and narrow the outlet, the mere fact that it exists tends to keep the crowd in healthy movement...

...The trouble with the descendants of this sane, balanced and deserving class, where they have not issued from mediocrity to riches, is that their appeal to imagination is very slight...

...When all the hard things that can be said about the dollar standard have been said, the fact remains it is far easier to become rich than to become rare...

...Stuart Sherman, in summing up the situation, "the code of the society of gentlemen...

...In an age of material enterprise, it is inevitably the man who can make things and get things distributed...

...In an age which worships effectiveness and the money effectiveness procures, but whose respect is quite unbounded by tradition—an age where everything human and divine is coming up for re-appraisal and re-accounting—it will be the man most master of his environment, be he millionaire or cracksman, poet or pugilist, trust-builder or tramp...

...In The Great Gatsby, Mr...

...The humble origins of great wealth rebuked any attempt at social snobbery...

...D. H. Lawrence in his Lost Girl, gives us a story of a woman's growing distaste for the inhibitions of the class into which she was born—her realization of her true nature as the submissive wife of an unlettered Italian peasant...

...But high thinking was a distinction...

...In his life of his great brother, Mr...

...Thus, in nineteenthcentury England, the rich manufacturer put his money into land, into a title, into portions that would allow his daughters to marry into the landed gentry...

...We work with our hands, we pay our way, we struggle for existence, men and women together, in a hard fight where courtesy and chivalry are impediments to survival, and the behavior of a lady is regarded as affectation and the honor of a gentleman as an old-fashioned piece of snobbishness...

...Gerrould, "despised by people they never before had to pay attention to: they spend their days between snobbishness and self-distrust...

...One hears many lament that what Mr...

...It is only occasionally, as when a millionaire dies leaving the whole of a fortune to something in which his interest was a personal secret, that it receives a dramatic demonstration...

...Their citizenship is so good that as personalities, they tend to disappear beneath it...

...We are very fond of calling this a practical age...

...Gerrould's is only the last) as to its loss of social consideration, but no hint that social consideration, unless it comes from those who are our kin by training and ideals, and who are in no doubt as to our worldly circumstances, is simply not worth having...

...It is raging in America in particularly virulent form today or else authors, editors, producers, and advertisers are in a conspiracy to mislead...

...Our devotion is for the very rich, the very poor, the swiftest runner, the greatest criminal—not for the unspectacular mean...

...But education and culture always have...

...Gerrould sees a class whom she prefers to term the "genteel" disappearing between a world which is rapidly becoming divided by two materialistic groups—the rich and the rich working class...

...It is generally in the terms of things that seemed good to him when he was on his way up, that the wealthy man sees the possibilities placed in his hands by money...

...The lowest rungs of the social ladder felt the thrill that came from the feet of men who were near the top...

...Gerrould has applied so unfortunate a name emerges from its present plight, the change will come from a resolute awakening to the fact that it is a class with a function all its own, and not a mere category limited on the one side by its dislikes and on the other by its disabilities...

...We bow before extremes...

...There were classes, but no castes...

...I guess I know where I studied life...

...By making the world a far more interesting place to contemplate and comment upon, it makes it a less grateful place to work in...

...Culture always has a selective effect...

...The genteel, who have never been rich, but who have grown used to being more or less looked up to on account of their culture and pleasant manners, are waking to the very insecure tenure of their social rank...

...Up to quite a recent period, the process that was transforming society was not so clear as it is today...

...It is because an article by Mrs...

...In a warlike age, it was the feudal lord who could assemble most men in the shortest time who was the most highly thought of...

...The worth of a class—its "valor" (to use the Roman phrase with which Premier Baldwin has lately been familiarizing the British public) is best known by the things from which it refrains, and a man is still master of that which he despises from his heart...

...The evil is at least as old as that...

...These were the things which earned respect—which marked off gentle from simple in his days of stress...

...In an age of religious strife, the man who could sway the beliefs and loyalties of men enjoyed great social consideration...

...He remembers that the refreshment furnished them by their frugal hostess was invariably thick bread-and-butter and coffee, and takes occasion to remark that the Rossettis were untouched by the spirit of "keeping up appearances1' which was the bane of the England of his youth (the eighteen thirties...

...Their very dependability betrays them...

...The respect which surrounded work of any sort was as yet intact...

...The doctor, the lawyer, the minister, and the author were very great personages 150 years ago...

...We have broken the molds...

...For one man or woman who deliberately and of set purpose achieves material success at the expense of finer feelings, there are probably a hundred who, in trying to make the best of two worlds, manage to succeed in neither...

...It is idle to expect a class to be taken seriously when neither in the books it reads, the plays it favors, nor the forms it lets its diversions take is there any evidence that it considers itself interesting...

...Plain living was a necessity...

...Scott Fitzgerald presents the other end of the scale—the life of a colony of rich wasters on Long Island, from whose pursuits and speech all but a thin veneer of the culture they have inherited is excluded...

...They see themselves, says Mrs...

...Passers-on are comparatively careless of an environment that would be extremely unpleasant if felt as likely to be permanent...

...Katherine Fullerton Gerrould, one of the best of our native essayists, voices a jeremiad over the fate of this class, and because it is bound to grow larger as education spreads, that it is worth more than passing attention...

...They perceive that a pushing, hurried world has hardly time to know that they are "different...

...Their language and habits of thought do not adapt them to colorful presentation...

...There are families today, the mere sound of whose name, because it is associated with this respect for knowledge, invests descendants who bear it with a sort of nebulous and borrowed social value all its own...

...Nothing keeps society more fluid than the absence of any social category which a young man, at the expense of a certain number of years of self-denial, may not hope to attain...

...Are we all such dull dogs—between Park Avenue and the East Side, Park Lane and Limehouse...

...and, being conservative, they conceal the current that has carried them to success by harking back to outworn fashions...

...Even those who were poor went to great sacrifice to put their sons to school and university...

...If ever the mold is restored and if ever the class to which Mrs...

...It is not in the mutual tolerance which the "genteel" exercise so well, as in the sharp moments when it is suspended, that drama lurks...

...But, as a matter of fact, it is no more practical than any which has passed into history...

...Rich men—arrived men—grow conservative...

...We haven't the means to keep it up...

...He liked to make them the symbols of his accomplishment...

...4 A February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL It often happens so...

...It withdraws from the communal task a certain number of men and women who, if its message had never reached them, would have been content to take lot and shot with their fellows...

...Education may not have meant money, but it meant power, self-respect, and the respect of others...

...Since snobbishness cannot endure in America without a bank account to back it, self-distrust possesses them at the end...

...One hears jeremiads aplenty (Mrs...

...In every age, the figure that commands respect is the one which can secure the service of his fellow men...

...The disadvantage about such a social theory is that it was bound to work hardship, not only on individual temperaments but on whole categories of individuals...

...In history and biography the same obsession reigns...

...In Mr...

...Gerrould shows us besieged from above and below—by wage-fixers as well as by price-fixers, is our own self-depreciation, our own subscription to sham ideals which are just as tawdry when gratified at the cost of hundreds as of millions of dollars...

...Sherwood Anderson is one among recent writers who has done a great deal to further it...

...Sinclair Lewis terms the "holy simplicities" of life are being put out of its reach, but looks in vain for any corporate attempt to create the demand that would procure a supply of them...

...It is a dismal picture, and it is worth pausing a moment while we examine, first, what exactly were the roots of the esteem which is passing from this meritorious class...

...In an age when law and order were evolving themselves, it has been the lawyer, with the might of the law behind him, or the politician who could deliver the vote which made the law...

...Being mechanical," may we no longer walk upon and between the boards of stage or novel ? Far more dangerous to the peace of mind and persistence of the people whom Mrs...

...How much of what the world considers success is due to a conscious renunciation of the aesthetic impulse will never be known...

...There is a new vogue away from the "genteel"—a new interest in the rascals, pandars, tramps, hoboes and demi-mondaines whom reputable history has hitherto kept in its footnotes...