but in some degree, at any rate, especially possess them.
Thus there is nothing really mean or sycophantic about the popular
literature which makes all its marquises seven feet high. It is
snobbish, but it is not servile. Its exaggeration is based on an
exuberant and honest admiration; its honest admiration is based upon
something which is in some degree, at any rate, really there. The
English lower classes do not fear the English upper classes in the
least; nobody could. They simply and freely and sentimentally worship
them. The strength of the aristocracy is not in the aristocracy at all;
it is in the slums. It is not in the House of Lords; it is not in the
Civil Service; it is not in the Government offices; it is not even in
the huge and disproportionate monopoly of the English land. It is in a
certain spirit. It is in the fact that when a navvy wishes to praise a
man, it comes readily to his tongue to say that he has behaved like a
gentleman. From a democratic point of view he might as well say that
he had behaved like a viscount. The oligarchic character of the modern
English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the
cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness
of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing
kindness of the poor to the rich.

The snobbishness of bad literature, then, is not servile; but the
snobbishness of good literature is servile. The old-fashioned
halfpenny romance where the duchesses sparkled with diamonds was not
servile; but the new romance where they sparkle with epigrams is
servile. For in thus attributing a special and startling degree of
intellect and conversational or controversial power to the upper
classes, we are attributing something which is not especially their
virtue or even especially their aim. We are, in the words of Disraeli
(who, being a genius and not a gentleman, has perhaps primarily to
answer for the introduction of this method of flattering the gentry),
we are performing the essential function of flattery which is
flattering the people for the qualities they have not got. Praise may
be gigantic and insane without having any quality of flattery so long
as it is praise of something that is noticeably in existence. A man
may say that a giraffe's head strikes the stars, or that a whale fills
the German Ocean, and still be only in a rather excited state about a
favourite animal. But when he begins to congratu