CONNEXIONS. • M OST men admit to some extent the "
claim " of even distant relationship. In this country, in which the patriarchal system has ceased to exist, there is still some clan feeling. Families do hang together more or less. Unsuccessful members expect to receive some help, and successful ones expect to have to give it. " I cannot very well refuse to do anything for the boy," men say ; " after all, he is a cousin, disagreeable young ruffian though he may be." The young ruffian in his turn thinks his better-placed cousin a snob if he does not reach him a friendly hand in a difficulty. Blood relations (outside tho first degree) are a boon or a bore according to the point of view.
Where connexions are concerned, however, the case is quite different. No one needs to do anything for his connexions." They cannot disgrace him or bring him much honour, but very often indeed he gets a good deal of interest and pleasure out of them. Old-fashioned people used to speak of being " highly connected " as a great advantage. They were right. It adds very much to the interest of life to be, as it were, mechanically brought across people in a slightly different sphere to one's own. As snobbishness dies down under the levelling influence of modern thought, we are inclined to think that low con- nexions (in a purely social sense) may also be regarded as well worth having. Nowadays we should all be inclined to regard it as an advantage to a man in a ruling position to be connected with people of several classes, and it may one day be considered one of the great qualifications of a man of the world. If at the present date a scholar could discover that Shakespeare had a kindly aunt with whom as a boy he passed much time and whose sister-in-law was married to a duke, we should all feel that Shakespeare's inspired knowledge of social life was in a measure explained; and in the same manner, if some wonderful novelist arose in the literary class who depicted to the life the mining popu- lation of Wales, we should all be very anxious to know whether he had any connexions among them. This means, of course, we should be interested to hear that there were circumstances whioh had brought him across the type of man whom he was painting in the ordinary course of life, and not only as an object of study ; in fact, that he was painting portraits of men and women he had met as friends, not worked from as models. Facilities of education will without doubt immensely increase men's field of vision in this sense. The classes will intermarry. An intimate school friend is, after all, a potential brother-in-law. The notions symbolized in the Austrian rules about " quarterings " are being carried away on the floods of change. As things are, the majority of people, even if they do their duty manfully by relatives of whom they are not proud, suppress the fact that their " connexions " come from a long social distance; but this merely shows that habits of mind outlast intellectual changes by very long periods, and minds are more limited by custom than conviction.
There are a great many people in the world who have no friends. Nevertheless, the desire for friendship, at any rate among the educated, is almost universal. All the friendless seek substitutes. An intense interest in "the family" (outside the first degree of relationship) is as a rule confined to people who have few or no intimacies based on anything but common tradition. They have no great pleasure in the exchange of ideas or in the less superficial side of social life. Perhaps they are very greatly taken up by their work, or perhaps they may be rather stupid, or else they are so very ill-informed, or so unfortunately unable to express themselves, or so temperamentally reserved that the pleasures of conver- sation hardly exist for them. They feel, however, the ordinary human need to keep " in touch " with a circle ; they fear isolation, or they are not satisfied with the very few close intimacies of domestic life. In following the fortunes of the persons of their own blood they find what they long for, and are hardly aware, even though " the family " returns their keen interest but dully, that they lack the human intercourse which many a man who habi- tually forgets his distant kith and kin enjoys among his friends. There is something rather admirable in this family exclusiveness. It is a quality rather like patriotism, and seldom goes with any very ignoble qualities. It means, as a rule, considerable interest in gossip, but that is neither a vice nor a virtue. In good-hearted people it is a charming peculiarity, softening and hiding their mental restrictions, making them in a restricted sense interesting and along a narrow line sympathetic. If a man or a woman is naturally spiteful or naturally a cynic, it is a misfortune for himself and every one else that he should be preoccupied with the intimate doings of his fellow-creatures either within or without his family circle. Such acid persons should be from their earliest youth shut up among books and en- couraged to attend to abstract matters only. Under such conditions their defects may be hardly noticeable. It is, however, only the unamiable and untruthful who should ever be discouraged from gossiping.
To return, however, to the subject of the family, or rather, to speak more accurately, the cousinhood. A large and growing number • of people have - no distant " family " at all. If they have no talent for friendship and no money to spend upon keeping up an " acquaint- ance " (for no luxury is dearer, as in these bad times so many of us know to our cost), they would but for their great interest in " connexions " find themselves out of touch with the world. No absorption in family trees was ever so great as the absorption of some women in " con- nexions." In boarding-houses and such-like refuges of the friendless, the tracing of connexions forms, we have been told, the great staple of conversation. To discover that their opposite neighbour's aunt's stepson's niece is going to be married to a distant cousin of their own will fill the minds of an elderly couple or a lone spinster for a whole evening. How they can possibly care about the matter those who care about more rational things will never know for certain. There are no conversational openings quite so dull as those which have reference• to the harmless sport of connexion-hunting. We cannot, however, deny that there is something pathetic about the ardour of those who take part in it. They are groping about to find some link with their fellow-creatures other than the ordinary ones of blood and heart and mind, and they get some sort of satisfaction, the same sort which a would-be traveller can get out of an atlas.
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