WHIT IS PRIGGISHNESS?
MR. BURNAND has just brought out in a separate IN__L volume his Punch parody on "Sandford and Merton," that didactic work published between 1783 and 1789 for the benefit of our treat-grandfathers by Mr. Thomas Day, the eccentric philanthropist who, as the "Dictionary of National Biography" informs us," objected on principle to combing his hair, though he was fond of washing." We do not think that Mr. Burnand has shown his usual felicity in this parody. The great characteristic of "Sandford and Merton," as of most of the English books written at the period when Rousseau had per- suaded a considerable section of European society into a very artificial enthusiasm for a "return to Nature," was its prig- gishness. Mr. Burnand makes his leading character, the Mr. Barlow of his parody, not a prig but a bully, a hypocrite, and a blackmailer of his pupils. Now, there is no great fun in sub- stituting for the original characteristics of an eccentric prig, bad qualities which have no sort of natural connection with those by which he was really distinguished. Mr. Thomas Day's "Mr. Barlow," who played guide, philosopher, and friend to Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, was very much in earnest indeed in his wish to establish a genuine fraternity and equality between the rich and poor, and to proclaim a gospel of liberty, with something like Rousseau's hysterical eagerness, to an enslaved world. He was not in the least a hypocrite or a selfish plunderer of his pupils and dis- ciples, but, on the contrary, a devotee of simplicity or simplesse, and a very genuine one too, who wasted a great deal of enthusiasm on the airing and propagation of his educa- tional crotchets. Mr. Day's story about Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, and their revered tutor, was one of the most significant of the symptoms of that craving for a return to Nature which took up such singularly formal, angular, and stilted attitudes in the days when " Nature " appears to have been understood as being anything but what we should now call natural. The time was a priggish time, and Mr. Day was a priggish author. But what do we precisely mean when we speak of a priggish epoch and a priggish author?
We mean certainly something more than a didactic epoch and a didactic author. Dr. Arnold was didactic, even Matthew Arnold was decidedly didactic ; but it would never occur to any one who knew either of them well, to describe either of them as a prig, or the period in which either of them lived as a priggish period. But the period which immediately preceded the French Revolution was undoubtedly a priggish period both abroad and at home. The period which gave to the world " BLair's Sermons," "Zimmermann on Solitude," " Zollikofer's Devo- tional Exercises," "Sandford and Merton," "Elements of Morality" (by Rev. C. G. Salzmann), the book which Blake illustrated so quaintly and vividly for the little prigs of the last decade of the last century, was in the highest degree a priggish period ; but what does the word really express ? Chiefly, we think, not so much didacticism as that absolutely ex- ternal attitude towards other minds which makes every one think of himself as an example, rather than as a member of society, and so harmonises with the didactic mood, and enforces its doctrines without the slightest attempt at anything like sympathetic discrimination. In "Sandford and Merton," for instance, everybody, good and bad, is priggish. Mr. Barlow is a prig, and so in a less degree is Mr. Merton. Harry Sandford is a terrible prig, but hardly any one exceeds in priggishness the child for the purpose of describing whose reformation the whole book was composed. Take the speech in which Tommy Merton confesses all his sins, and abases himself before his fond mother, at the close of the book. That can hardly be called didactic, as it is rather a speech of humiliation than of oracular wisdom ; but it is one of the most priggish speeches in the story. When the child enters without powder on his hair, without his favourite shoe-buckles, without his elegant curls, without any of his finery, his mother exclaims "What in the name of wonder has the boy been doing now ? Why, Tommy, I protest you have made yourself a perfect fright. and you look more like a plowboy than a young gentleman." "Mamma," answered Tommy, gravely, "I am only now what I ought always to have been. Had I been contented with this dress before, I never should have imitated such a parcel of coxcombs as you have lately had at your house, nor pre- tended to admire Miss Matilda's music, which, I own, tired me as much as Harry, and almost set me asleep nor should I have exposed myself at the play and the ball ; and, what is worst of all, I should have avoided all my shameful behaviour to Harry at the bull-baiting. But, from this time, I shall apply myself to the study of nothing but reason and philosophy, and therefore I have bid adieu to dress and finery for ever." Bat evidently he had not bid adieu to priggishness. He was a prig when he struck Harry Sandford in the face ; but he was still more a prig when he begged his pardon, and entered on the study of "reason and philosophy." No wonder "it was with great difficulty the gentlemen could refrain from laughing at Tommy's harangue, delivered with infinite seriousness and solemnity." They would have done better if they had made no effort to refrain, but had laughed heartily at the little prig ; only then they would not have been the prigs they were themselves. Priggishness is a kind of attitudinising before the world, whether a moral or immoral attitudinising. It is not necessarily didactic. It is necessarily formal and self-important. At the end of the last century, England was in a phase in which people " protested " much, as Mrs. Merton " protested " to Tommy against his ploughboy's dress and manner. And you cannot " protest " without separating yourself with some ostentation from the rest of the world .to which the protest is addressed. It was a time of formal and ostentatious protests. The "return to Nature" was a protest, and a protest which indulged freely in soliloquy and flourishes of rhetoric. So was the pedantry which vented its scorn on the return to Nature, and endeavoured to keep up all the airs and graces which the sentiment of the new time condemned. Those who entered their protest against the manners they had inherited, and those who entered their protest against the protesters, were equally fond of the gesticulations of a stage manner. They fancied them-
selves the observed of all observers ; and whether they took up with the new ideas or with the old, they flourished about, laying their hands on their hearts, or, it might be, casting dust and ashes on their heads. We open the little book, translated from the German of the Rev. C. G. Salzmann, for the benefit of our forefathers of the last portion of the last century, "Elements of Morality," and we find an invalid dilating on his ill-health to his clerical friend in the following self-important fashion :—" I have no one to nurse me, and sickness makes all ray acquaintance fly from me. It is true many of my relatives come to visit me, but I think they only come to calculate how long I shall thus gradually be sinking into the grave. Believe me, my dear friend, I often wish to be in the place of one of my day-labourers ; to be able to eat, drink, sleep, and laugh, and to have children to take care of me in my old age. I see them dancing round my sturdy plowman, while I, wretched man, am a burden to my- self.' He raised his eyes toward Heaven and a tear stole down his pale cheek ;" and no doubt the tear was a great satisfaction to him, which he sincerely hoped that his "dear friend" had noticed and properly appreciated.
There is egotism in all priggishness, but there is plenty of egotism nowadays, and there is not very much priggishness nowadays, for it has gone out of fashion. The egotism of to- day is either unconscious or frank. The egotism of the prig is neither unconscious nor frank, it is self-conscious and pompous. It may offer an example to the world, whether it be a reforming example, or an anti-reforming example ; or, like this unfortunate invalid, who shed a tear on his own wretched- ness, it may bold itself up as an awful warning of the mis- takes and illusions to which human nature is liable. "All this misery," says an attitudinising pauper sitting on the floor, in the same book, "in broken sentences and a low, hollow voice, for his lungs were already half-gone, All this misery I owe to my intemperance," and he is evidently quite in hopes that his fellow-men will "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the story of his vices and his woes. And the clergy- man and little boy stand by, making in Blake's admirable illustration, a sheepishly piteous face over the victim of his own intemperance, as if they were saying to themselves : We see it and bewail it, but we will do our best to take warning, and to help others to take warning by you, and that perhaps may be a consolation to you,'—as, indeed, it probably would have been, for the victim of intemperance certainly aimed at producing a vivid impression. Priggishness consists, then, we think, in making oneself an object-lesson to the world, whether an object-lesson in virtue or an object-lesson in vice. Tommy Merton had this great advantage over Harry Sandford, that he could make himself an object-lesson in both; and therefore he succeeded, on the whole, in surpassing his friend. Harry Sandford was a dreadful little prig, but he could only hold himself up to Master Tommy and his foolish fine friends as an object-lesson in virtue. When Master Tommy reformed himself, and came in with nnpowdered hair and plain shoe-buckles, he not only presented himself to his father and mother and tutor as a student in "reason and philosophy" for the future, but as a reformed rake who could point to his delinquencies with severe reprobation for the edification of all erring boys of wealth and fashion, as regarded the past. Hence his wealth stood him in good stead after all. He beat the young farmer by attitudinising in two capacities, while the other could atti- tudinise only in one. Even Mr. Barlow could attitudinise only as a philanthropist who cultivated simplicity and admired the poor. But Tommy could attitudinise both as a philan- thropist who had wealth to give away, and also as a returned prodigal who had lavished himself on evil pleasures, and yet had returned of his own free will to unpowdered hair and plain shoe-buckles. Mr. Barlow and Harry Sandford never confess it, but we are persuaded that if Mr. Day's historic conscience had but been candid enough to admit it, he would have told us that both of them were consumed with secret envy of Tommy Merton for the advantage he had gained over them in having been able to pose in the great and impres- sive parts of both prodigal son and virtuous convert, while they had been limited by their poverty and 'uniform simplicity to the single part of setting an ostentatiously good example to the world.
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