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There was no touch of servility in Johnson's respect for his sovereign, a respect fully reconcilable with a sense of his own personal dignity. Johnson spoke of his interview with an unfeigned satisfaction, which it would be difficult in these days to preserve from the taint of snobbishness.
He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and when I praised Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he could only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference. Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upper ten thousand. His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure that it was altogether mistaken.
There is no princess of my own country whom I could meet on equal terms. So, you see, although it develops differently, there is something of the snobbishness of your western countries reflected in our own ideas." "But I am not a princess," Maggie murmured. "You are the princess of my soul," he answered, lowering his eyes for a moment almost reverently.
My general feeling, however, was that of the idealist who despises the schoolmaster or the scholar who becomes worldly in his old age, and even goes so far as to follow the shameless maxim, "Dine with the Tories and vote with the Whigs." Of course I know now that Jowett's apparent worldliness and snobbishness were calculated.
Dispassionately she noticed the lack of breeding in his face, the marks of early dissipation, the lines that sin had etched. And as she looked she laughed with just the suggestion of hauteur. For the first time in her life Rose-Marie was experiencing a touch of snobbishness, of class distinction. "We won't discuss my reason," she told him slowly; "it should be quite evident to any one!"
Everything came to him in the excitement of talk, epigrams, paradoxes and stories; and when people of great position or title were about him he generally managed to surpass himself: all social distinctions appealed to him intensely. I chaffed him about this one day and he admitted the snobbishness gaily. "I love even historic names, Frank, as Shakespeare did.
You complained I treated you like a lackey; it was not unnatural when of your own freewill you played the lackey so assiduously." He laughed. He had anatomized himself too frequently and with too much dispassion to overlook whatever tang of snobbishness might be in him; and, moreover, the charge thus tendered became in reality the speaker's apology, and hurt nobody's self-esteem.
A man or woman of equal character and force became his equal, as Jasper did, as Isopel and David Haggart did, and he accepted this equality without a trace of snobbishness. He says himself that he has "no abstract love for what is low, or what the world calls low." Certainly there is nothing low in his familiars, as he presents them, at least nothing sordid.
Such pleasure as he had outside Cambridge was in the homes of his friends, and it was a particular joy and honour to visit Ansell, who, though as free from social snobbishness as most of us will ever manage to be, was rather careful when he drove up to the facade of his shop. "I like our new lettering," he said thoughtfully.
Sometimes in cocottes, in stage women, in fashionable women this expression is self-conscious, or supercilious. It was not so with Susan, for she had little self-consciousness and no snobbishness at all. It merely gave the charm of worldly experience and expertness to a beauty which, without it, might have been too melancholy.
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