Snob

“ Perfect wisdom would cast out not only ignorance, but also frivolity, sentimentality, vanity, all sorts of false standards and all manner of fallacies. Therefore snobs, romanticists, egoists, fanatics, merely exemplify folly in its varieties and ramifications.
The snob is defined by his great expositor as “one who meanly admires mean things.” A modern scholar calls vulgarity “satisfaction with anything inferior when a superior is attainable.” ”

“ I have trained him. I have taught him how to dine—which he had once imagined consisted in eating what money could procure. I have taught him to live. He is no longer a snob; at least, he doesn't betray himself. ”

“ Of all the men I have known he was the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances. ”

“ and I could have kicked myself for the snob and the cad that my thoughts had proven me—me, who had always prided myself that I was neither the one nor the other! ”

“ When you hear a man insisting upon points of etiquette and fashion; wondering, for instance, how people can eat with steel forks and survive it, or what charms existence has for persons who dine at three without soup and fish, be sure that that individual is a snob. ”

“ He married the daughter of a chemist, who affected some social superiority, and he became something of a snob, in his dogged fashion, with a passion for outward refinement in the household, mad when anything clumsy or gross occurred. ”

“ If the truthful is the beautiful, it is beautiful to study even the snobbish;—to track snobs through history as certain little dogs in Hampshire hunt out truffles; to sink shafts in society, and come upon rich veins of snob-ore. Snobbishness is like Death, in a quotation from Horace, which I hope you never heard, 'beating with equal foot at poor men's doors, and kicking at the gates of emperors.' It is a great mistake to judge of snobs lightly, and think they exist among the lower classes merely. ”

“ If he had been really a snob, he would have looked up stupidly to what has no true sublimity, like birth without money, would have imitated what was not becoming to his station, and would have shunned company, such as our own, which though perhaps not the most fashionable is undoubtedly the best. ”

“ His one pose is that of the plain-spoken, natural man, in the presence of a snob. Everywhere he is as independent as a parrot or a tramp. In life, few are to be envied so much. For he achieves everything but success. ”

“ But in a country like England or the United States of America, where society is arranged in different stories, with staircases between, snobbism is frequent and flourishing.
The snob is the man who tries to sneak up-stairs. He is the surreptitious climber, the person who is ashamed to pass for what he is. ”

“ When two doughty heroes thunder,
All the world is lost in wonder;
When such men their temper lose,
Awful are the words they use!
LUD. Tall snobs, small snobs, rich snobs and needy ones!
RUD. (jostling him) . Whom are you alluding to?
LUD. (jostling him) . Where are you intruding to?
RUD. Fat snobs, thin snobs, swell snobs and seedy ones! ”

“ Consider all the vain pride and barbaric pomp of wealth and fashion, and all the mean envy of the weakly snobs who revere them, and would sell their withered souls to possess them. Is this decorative tomfoolery, are this apish swagger and blazoned snobbery worthy of men and women? ”

“ To my astonishment, a good-looking snob, sitting next to this lady, with great, big brown eyes, from which occasionally shot flashes of sapient imbecility, a silly mouth with prominent teeth, and receding chin, proclaiming the half-educated idiot, cut into the conversation, and said—
“ I can’t contheve any man living all the year round on his friends.” ”

“ And there are also many women in the world who, under the clothes, and not unfrequently under the title of a lady, wear the heart of an underbred snob. Having no natural dignity, they think to supply its place with arrogance. ”

“ What I have got is honest, and something that I know I can do well—something I enjoy, too; and I 'm not going to let a vulgar young snob like that make me ashamed of myself, when I 've nothing to be ashamed of."
"You ought to be proud of yourself, not ashamed!" ”

“ The betwixt-and-betweens are always nervous, and shyness will make them sheepish, self-assertive, familiar, vulgar or dumb according to their temperaments. These wobblers, wherever they are found in the social ladder, all drop good manners with the same anxious trepidation, the rich in the halls of the great, the clerk and his wife in the middle-class drawing room, the wife of the country townsman on the precarious fringe of the county, the shallow prig in the presence of the artist, in fact, the snob generally on the threshold of his desire. ”

“ you, who forget your own friends, meanly to follow after those of a higher degree, are a Snob; ”

“ A complete and astonishing psychology of snobbishness is contained in the impressions, the traits, the concise profiles, the strangely-outlined and life-like silhouettes, of which this prodigal and never-wearying originality was an ever-flowing source. ”

“ There 's snobs that are only snobs; there 's snobs that have nothing distinctive about them but their snobbery, and there 's snobs so well up in life, so shrewd, such downright keen men of the world, that their snobbery is only an accident, like a splash from a passing 'bus; and, in fact, their snobbery puts a sort of accent on their acuteness, just like a trade-mark, and tells you it was town-made—no bad thing, Bramleigh, when that town calls itself London! ”

“ I doubt if the Vames are much of a cut above the Backmakers; well, youre a general drudge and I’m a governess and tutor and even in a way a sort of distant friend to Mrs Smythe.”
“That sounds suspiciously like snobbery to me.”
“Does it? Well, I’m a snob; Ive never denied it. I want to live like a lady, to have a good house with servants and carriages and minibiles, to travel to civilized countries, with a place in Paris or Rome or Vienna. You can love the [Pg 48] poor and cheer for the Populists; I love the rich and the Whigs.” ”

“ But there are vulgar persons with bad manners who who are not in the least snobs, so that after stating the general order of the persons to which a snob belongs, you must separate him from all other varieties of that class. ”

“ And when this dissection is after a fashion accomplished, it is the less useful, in that the same strand is discovered to change its color and texture from one section to another. Deception is here a vice and there a virtue. Folly is here amusing and there horrifying. Egoism is here absorbent and there encroaching. There are sentimental epicures and unsentimental epicures and ascetic sentimentalists. There are vulgar snobs and refined snobs and a vulgarity that is not snobbish. ”

“ Yet defeat and rejection might cover me with certain ridicule, leaving the stings of wounded self-esteem to rankle all the deeper, by thrusting the partial disparity of our relative positions in society more unpleasantly and humiliatingly before me and the world; for there is a snobbery in rank that is only equalled by the snobbery of wealth, and here I might have both to encounter. ”

“ The man who worships mere wealth is a snob. ”

“ It contains a good suggestion of that weak romance which is the root of all snobbishness: that the mystery which belongs to patrician life excites us more than the open, even the indecent virtues of the humble. ”

“ Is it simply a habit that we cannot throw off or is there a certain snobbishness about it that appeals to the flunkeyism of men? That is perhaps the explanation. That is perhaps why it has disappeared when snobbishness is felt to be inconsistent with the world of stern realities and bitter sorrows in which we live. We are humble and serious and out of humour with the pretentious vanity of our top-hat. ”

“ We are indeed fast gaining an unenviable fame for snobbery, for affecting to be what we never can be, and for our sad imitation of foreign flunkydom, which, finding us rivals in the realm of its tinsil, begins to button up its coat and look contemptuously at us over the left shoulder. ”

“ I knew nothing of their careful gradations of snobbism—the people to know socially, the people to know in a business way, the people to know in ways religious and philanthropic, the people to know for the fun to be got out of them, the people to pride oneself on not knowing at all; the nervousness, the hysteria about preserving these disgusting gradations. ”

“ There I used to seek him out with offerings of snuff, to get him to tell me those stories of the ancient grandeur of his race which I loved to hear; for youth has always a tinge of snobbishness, which is at the root of that hero-worship common to all children. ”

“ Have birth, money, and fashion no value whatever? Do they not dazzle the innocent and unsophisticated with a distant image of happiness? Are they not actually, when enjoyed, very comforting and delightful things in their way? What else than this sensitiveness to better social example—which we may call snobbery if we please—lends English life in particular its most characteristic excellences—order without constraint, leisure without apathy, seclusion without solitude, good manners without punctilio, emulation without intrigue, splendour without hollowness? ”

“ In popular apprehension, indeed, snobbishness and vulgarity are rated as more opposite than allied. The snob is thought of as either belonging to the polite world or trying to secure an entrance to its polished circles. If he occupies the former position, he boasts of his refinement, and from his eminence contemplates with scorn or at best an affable condescension, the mob below. To this class belong such members as Lytton’s and Disraeli’s aristocrats; such diverse types in Dickens as Sir John Chester, the Monseigneur in Tale of Two Cities, Mrs. ”

“ You see, young gentlemen, while I don’t want you, of all things in the world, ever to be snobbish, I do want you to be observant. So just take this advice from me, and let these men do your work right at the start. ”

“ You could give them a good deal. To say nothing of your own high intelligence, they are by no means averse from taking an occasional flyer into the realm of fashion. Curiosity partly, natural human snobbishness, perhaps. ”

“ Divine Engadine, beloved, adored, blessed by all those who have discovered the face of love and perhaps of happiness. While the pleasure-seekers forgetfully left her without regret, seeking other surroundings with other pleasures, with an inextinguishable thirst that inundated the hearts and souls, while the snobs left without understanding anything, diseased with snobbishness as they were, and anxious to find other circles where they could abandon themselves to their ridiculous infirmity ”

“ The process is almost too natural to be called snobbery, though its result often gives rise to that unpleasant quality, for the feminine element is buoyant and subject rather to the laws of expansion than those of gravity. ”

“ The snobbishness itself should not be set down to her discredit, but should be charged up to that class feeling, as old as property, and fostered and developed by almost every familiar fact in our daily environment. ”

“ I mean a low, mean, unworthy snobbishness and abasement which treats the humans as superior creatures, and affects a ludicrous familiarity and connection with them. This fellow, glad enough to steal our nuts when no visitors are about, in their presence mounts his perch with his back to us, and turns up his nose. ”

“ You will be incredulous, gentle reader, devoured of snobbishness and dazzled by what you have heard and read of the glories of fashionable society in the metropolis. You will be incredulous, because you, too, like the overwhelming majority of the comfortable classes in this great democracy—and many of the not so comfortable classes as well—because you, too, are infected of the mania for looking about for some one who refuses to associate with you on the ground that you are “common,” and for straightway making it your heart’s dearest desire to compel that person to associate with you. ”

“ Neatness correlates, in varying degrees, with all the traits except vulgarity and sociability; intelligence with all except vulgarity and perhaps sociability; humor with all except neatness, conceit and refinement, where the coefficients are low; conceit correlates especially closely with neatness, beauty and snobbishness; beauty with neatness, [Pg 171] humor, conceit and refinement; vulgarity correlates positively with only humor and snobbishness, and negatively with refinement; refinement, with everything except humor, snobbishness and vulgarity ”

“ If you are, gentle reader, you are showing yourself unworthy of your own soulfulness, unworthy of the elegant society into which I have introduced you. I have been giving simply the plain facts—a mere skeleton upon which you, versed in society columns and society novels, and skilled in the art of hiding ugly truths under pretty lies, may readily drape the flesh and the garments of sentimentality and snobbishness. ”