What is Snobbery?

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 31, 5 August 1933, Page 19

What is Snobbery?

The trouble is that in snobbishlyjudging the snob, \v! are all occasionally betrayed into that worst form of. snobbery, judging by our own timid standards the truly unaffected, j selfpossessed man. or woman, Writes Clemence Dane. For snobbery, after al,l is no more than our old friend the "inferiority complex,'' the child -of fear and conceit. ''I am not as you are. Your attainments frighten me. But I'm not going to let you think I know I'm not as good as you are." That is the attitude of the snob. But is the man who dresses every night for dinner in the wilderness in order to keep "his self-respect" a snob? It,'s customary.,to laugh-at hinty but—l'm. not sure. Is he'not .rather a< man. who knows'the limitations of his own- character, knows how easy it is for a man or a gardenl to degenerate and 1 become one again with the weeds in the wilderness* Is exciusivene'ss, which after all is a preference for being with people of one's own caste and creed, necessarily a snobbery—is it, for that matter, anobbery to insist that a. convention of suitable dros3 for certain occasions should be preserved? Where, in fact, does snobbery become'convention and convention a sense of what is suitable, or, to quote St. Paul, "expedient"? Snobbery is tho symbol of bad taste, and yet, like a poor'relation, it follows its cousin—good taste —hard on the heels. Perhaps it is easiest to agree that we can't help being snobs, but we can sec to it that our particular pet sjiobbery can.masquerade as a, comicality or as [a grace. '