Pinchbeck

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Title:     Pinchbeck
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

Not many years ago no really refined gentlewoman would have worn pinchbeck. False jewelry and imitation lace were touchstones with the sex, and the woman who would condescend to either was assumed, perhaps not quite without reason, to have lost something more than the mere perception of technical taste. This feeling ran through the whole of society, and pinchbeck was considered as at once despicable and disreputable. The successful speculator, sprung from nothing, who had made his fortune during the war, might buy land, build himself a mansion, and set up a magnificent establishment, but he was never looked on as more than a lucky adventurer by the aboriginal gentry of the place; and the blue blood, perhaps nourishing itself on thin beer, turned up its nose disdainfully at the claret and madeira which had been personally earned and not lineally inherited. This exclusiveness was narrow in spirit, and hard in individual working; and yet there was a wholesome sentiment underlying its pride which made it valuable in social ethics, if immoral on the score of natural equality and human charity. It was the rejection of pretentiousness, however gilded and glittering, in favor of reality, however poor and barren; it was the condemnation of make-believes--the repudiation of pinchbeck. It is not a generation since this was the normal attitude of society towards its nouveaux riches and Brummagem jewelry; but time moves fast in these later days, and national sentiments change as quickly as national fashions.

We are in the humor to rehabilitate all things, and pinchbeck has now its turn with the rest. The lady of slender means who would refuse to wear imitation lace and false jewelry is as rare as the country society which would exclude the nouveau riche because of his newness, and not adopt him because of his riches. The whole anxiety now is, not what a thing is, but how it looks--not its quality, but its appearance. Every part of social and domestic life is dedicated to the apotheosis of pinchbeck. It meets us at the hall door, where miserable make-believes of stuccoed pillars are supposed to confer a quasi-palatial dignity on a wretched little villa, run up without regard to one essential of home comfort or of architectural truth. It goes with us into the cold, conventional drawing-room, where all is for show, nothing for use, where no one lives, and which is just the mere pretence of a dwelling-room, set out to deceive the world into the belief that its cheap finery is the expression of the every-day life and circumstances of the family. It sits with us at the table, which a confectioner out of a back street has furnished, and where everything, down to the very flowers, is hired for the occasion. It glitters in the brooches and bracelets of the women, in the studs and signet-rings of the men; it is in the hired broughams, the hired waiters, the pigmy page-boys, the faded paper flowers, the cheap champagne, and the affectation of social consideration that meet us at every turn. The whole of the lower section of the middle classes is penetrated through and through with the worship of pinchbeck, and for one family that holds itself in the honor and simplicity of truth, ten thousand lie, to the world and to themselves, in frippery and pretence.

The greatest sinners in this are women. Men are often ostentatious, often extravagant, and not unfrequently dishonest in that broadway of dishonesty which is called living beyond their means--sometimes making up the deficit by practices which end in the dock of the Old Bailey; but, as a rule, they go in for the real thing in details, and their pinchbeck is at the core rather than on the surface. Women, on the contrary, give themselves up to a more general pretentiousness, and, provided they can make a show, care very little about the means; provided they can ring their metal on the counter, they ignore the want of the hall-stamp underneath. Locality, dress, their visiting-list, and domestic appearances are the four things which they demand shall be in accord with their neighbor's; and for these four surfaces they will sacrifice the whole internal fabric. They will have a showy-looking house, encrusted with base ornamentation and false grandeur, though it lets in wind, rain, and sound almost as if it were made of mud or canvas, rather than a plain and substantial dwelling-place, with comfort instead of stucco, and moderately thick walls instead of porches and pilasters. Most of their time is necessarily passed at home, but they undergo all manner of house discomfort resulting from this preference of cheap finery over solid structure, rather than forego their "genteel locality" and stereotyped ornamentation. A family of daughters on the one side, diligent over the "Battle of Prague;" a nursery full of crying babies on the other; more Battles of Prague opposite, diversified by a future Lind practicing her scales unweariedly; water-pipes bursting in the frost, walls streaming in the thaw, the lower offices reeking and green with damp, and the upper rooms too insecure for unrestricted movement--all these, and more miseries of the same kind, she willingly encounters rather than shift into a locality relatively unfashionable to her sphere, but where she could have substantiality and comfort for the same rent that she pays now for flash and pinchbeck.

In dress it is the same thing. She must look like her neighbors, no matter whether they can spend pounds to her shillings, and run up a milliner's bill beyond what she can afford for the whole family living. If they can buy gold, she can manage pinchbeck; glass that looks like jet, like filagree work, like anything else she fancies, is every bit to her as good as the real thing; and if she cannot compass Valenciennes and Mechlin, she can go to Nottingham and buy machine-made imitations that will make quite as fine a show. How poor soever she may be, she must hang herself about with ornaments made of painted wood, glass, or vulcanite; she must break out into spangles and beads and chains and benoîtons, which are cheap luxuries, and, as she thinks, effective. Flimsy silks make as rich a rustle to her ear as the stateliest brocade, and cotton-velvet delights the soul that cannot aspire to Genoa. The love of pinchbeck is so deeply ingrained in her that even if, in a momentary fit of aberration into good taste, she condescends to a simple material about which there can be neither disguise nor pretence, she must load it with that detestable cheap finery of hers till she makes herself as vulgar in a muslin as she was in a cotton velvet.

The simplex munditiis, which used to be held as a canon of feminine good taste, is now abandoned altogether, and the more she can bedizen herself according to the pattern of a Sandwich islander the more beautiful she thinks herself, the more certain the fascination of the men, and the greater the jealousy of the women. This is the cause of all the tags and streamers, the bits of ribbon here and flying ends of laces there, the puffed-out chignons, and the trailing curls cut off some dead girl's head, wherewith the modern Englishwoman delights to make herself hideous. It is pinchbeck throughout. But we fear she is past praying for in the matter of fashion, and that she is too far given over to the abomination of pretence to be called back to truth for any ethical reason whatsoever, or indeed by anything short of high examples. And then, if simplicity became the fashion, we should have our pinchbeck votaries translating that into extremes as they do now with ornamentation; if my lady took to plainness, they would go to nakedness.

Another bit of pinchbeck is the visiting-list--the cards of invitation stuck against the drawing-room glass--with the grandest names and largest fortunes put forward, irrespective of dates or tenses. The chance contact with the people represented may be quite out of the ordinary circumstances of life, but their names are paraded as if an accident, which has happened once and may never occur again, were in the daily order of events. They are brought to the front to make others believe that the whole social thickness is of the same quality; that generals and admirals and sirs and ladies are the common elements of the special circle in which the family habitually moves; that pinchbeck is good gold, and that stucco means marble. Women are exceedingly tenacious of these pasteboard appearances.

In a house with its couple of female servants, where formal visitors are very rare, and invitations, save by friendly word of mouth, rarer still, you may see a cracked china bowl or cheap mock patera on the hall table, to receive the cards which are assumed to come in the thick showers usual with high people who have hall-porters, and a thousand names or more on their books. The pile gets horribly dusty to be sure, and the upper layer turns by degrees from cream-color to brown; but antiquity is not held to weaken the force of grandeur. The titled card left on a chance occasion more than a year ago still keeps the uppermost place, still represents a perpetual renewal of aristocratic visits, and an unbroken succession of social triumphs. Yellowed and soiled, it is none the less the trump-card of the list; and while the outside world laughs and ridicules, the lady at home thinks that no one sees through this puerile pretence, and that the visiting-list is accepted according to the status of the fugleman at the head. She is very happy if she can say that the pattern of her dress, her cap, her bonnet, was taken from that of Lady So and So; and we may be quite sure that all personal contact with grand folks does so express itself, and perpetuate the memory of the event, by such imitation--at a distance. It is too good an occasion for the airing of pinchbeck to be disregarded, and, consequently, for the most part is turned to this practical account. Whether the fashion will be suited to the material, or to the other parts of the dress, is quite a secondary consideration, it being of the essence of pinchbeck to despise both fitness and harmony.

There is a large amount of pinchbeck in the appearance of social influence, much cultivated by women of a certain activity of mind, and with more definite aims than all women have. This belongs to a grade one step higher than the small pretences we have been speaking of--to women who have money, and so far have one reality, but who have not, by their own birth or their husband's, the original standing which would give them this influence as of right. Some make themselves notorious for their drawing-room patronage of artists, which, however, does not often include buying their pictures; others gather around them scores of obscure authors, whose books they talk of, if they do not read; a few, a short time since, were centres of spiritualistic circles, and got a queer kind of social influence thereby, so far as Philistine desire to witness the "manifestations" went; and one or two are names of weight in the emancipated ranks, and take chiefly to what they call "working women." These are they who attend Ladies' Committees, where they talk bosh, and pound away at utterly uninteresting subjects, as diligently as if what they said had any point in it, and what they did any ultimate issue in probability or common sense. But beyond the fact of having a large house, where their several sets may assemble at stated periods, these would-be lady patronesses are utterly impotent to help or hinder; and their patronage is just so much pinchbeck, not worth the trouble of weighing.

In all this gaudy attempt at show, this restless dissatisfaction with what they are, and ceaseless endeavour to appear something they are not, our middle-class ladies are doing themselves and society infinite mischief. They set the tone to the world below them, and the small tradespeople and the servants, when they copy the vices of their superiors, do not imitate her grace the duchess, but the doctor's wife over the way, and the lawyer's lady next door, and the young ladies everywhere, who all try to appear women of rank and fortune, and who are ashamed of nothing as much as of industry, truth and simplicity. Hence the rage for cheap finery in the kitchen, just a trifle more ugly and debased than that worn in the drawing-room; hence the miserable pretentiousness, and pinchbeck fine-ladyism, filtering like poison through every pore of our society, to result God only knows in what grave moral cataclysm, unless women of mind and education will come to the front, and endeavour to stay the plague already begun.

Chains and brooches may seem but small material causes for important moral effects, but they are symbols; and, as symbols, of deep national value. No good will be done till we get back some of our fine old horror of pinchbeck, and once more insist on truth as the foundation of our national life. Education and refinement will be of no avail if they do not land us here; and the progress of the arts and society must not be brought to mean chiefly the travesty of civilized ladies into the semblance of savages, by the cheap imitation of costly substances. Women are always rushing about the world eager after everything but their home business. Here is something for them to do--the regeneration of society by means of their own energies; the bringing people back to the dignity of truth and the beauty of simplicity; and the substitution of that self-respect which is content to appear what it is, for the feeble pride which revels in pinchbeck because it cannot get gold, and which endeavors so hard to hide its real estate, and to pass for what it is not and never could be.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Pinchbeck

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