Snobbery

“ 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. ”

“ How many people we meet who cover their ignorance by a look of profundity.
When will people learn that snobbery is the evidence of a small mind, and that shoddyism is the proof of a vulgar one? How long before people will be convinced of the fact, that, education, talent, and good breeding, are the most essential requisites for success. ”

“ 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? ”

“ This country gentleman turned novelist was an upright, guileless creature, hard riding, generous hearted, as unconscious of his innate snobbery as of his natural modesty, conventional because unaware of any world or school of thought beyond the narrow limits of his own. ”

“ Are you ever destined to experience these sensations, Potts? Is there a time coming when anxious ears will strain to catch your words, and eyes watch eagerly for your slightest gestures? If such an era should ever come, it will be a great one for the masses of mankind, and an evil one for snobbery. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sad thing is that the natural good manners of English people are so largely corrupted by snobbery of different kinds, and it is the women who are worst affected by this taint, since it is through them that lines of social intercourse are drawn, while men hover more easily on both sides of the fence. The tinge of snobbery may be fierce or faint, but the least trace of it is a stain on the fair face of good manners. ”

“ But there are things that do interest me—genius and wit and culture and charm, for instance—and I am quite as hard on the people who lack these gifts, as ever you are on the impecunious nobodies. I confess I am often ashamed of myself when I realize how frightfully I look down upon stupid men and dull women, and how utterly indifferent I am as to what becomes of them. So I really am [Pg 268] as great a snob as you are, though I wear my snobbery—like my rue—with a difference."
"Not a snob, dear lady—never a snob! There never existed a woman with less snobbery in her composition than you have. ”

“ I should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak to them, you know.
PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.
HIGGINS. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now that you have risen in the world. That’s what we call snobbery. ”

“ I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school – I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet – but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ The fact that his father was a titled man and that Speed never talked about it, was bound to impress a group of men who, by the unalterable circumstances of their lives, were compelled to spend a large portion of their time in cultivating an attitude of snobbery. ”

“ Everywhere there has spread a strange disease of romantic snobbery, the sufferers from which, in their efforts at æsthetic expression, always pretend to be what they are not. Excellent mothers of families, in their furniture and sometimes even in their clothes, pretend to be King's mistresses. ”

“ By pamphlets, newspaper articles, lectures, personal visits and all other appeals to their snobbery, persuade them that hitherto they have seen only vulgar spectacles, and are at last to know what is art and beauty. ”

“ Perhaps, too, a certain egotistical ambition to distinguish himself above his fellows had something to do with his enthusiasm. Among persons born in privileged positions and in the midst of wealth, snobbery often takes 36a form rather different from that which it commonly assumes. Not always, indeed; for there are plenty of rich and titled persons who regard wealth and title with the same abject respect as is shown by those whose acquaintance with the nobility and the plutocracy is only in fiction and the pages of the weekly papers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Who has not sometimes been amused iff passing along the fashionable street of a great city, to see a little vulgar snob dressed out within an inch of his life, walking along, evidently fancying that he looks like a gentleman, and that he is the admired of all admirers? Sometimes, in a certain street which I might name, I have witnessed such a spectacle, sometimes with amusement, oftener with sorrow and pity, as I thought of the fearful, dark surmises which must often cross the poor snob's mind, that he is failing in his anxious endeavours. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Exposition by Contrast.—A further device in explanation is contrast, showing the ways in which the subject of your exposition differs from its opposite. The explanation of the snob might be continued by contrasting him with a perfect gentleman, thus bringing out more clearly the offensive qualities. Or, you might go back to the sort of comparison you used in explaining courage, perseverance, etc., and compare the snob to a person thoroughly rude, a boor, showing how he differs: the snob is rude only to people who, he thinks, have no means of punishing him for it ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nobody is quiet here, nor am I. The rush and restlessness please me, and I like, for a little, the dash of the stream. I am not received as a god, which I like too. There is one paper which goes on every morning saying I am a snob, and I don't say no. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And I saw that my and Edna’s feeling of strangeness toward them was intimacy beside the feeling of strangeness toward us which they now had. In my dealings with my fellow beings I have often noted this sort of thing—that the snobbishness of those who look down is a weak and hesitating impulse which would soon die out but for the encouragement it gets from the snobbishness of those who look up. I read somewhere, “Caste is made by those who look up, not by those who look down.” That is a great truth, and like most great, simple, obvious truths is usually overlooked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”