most people mean different things. Guileless snobs read the small
paragraphs in the paper, and think they are learning about it. Others
walk in the Park and are sure they see it: the suburbs think that it is
the sort of circle in which their pet actor habitually moves: South
Kensington thinks it is in Park Lane, or the private view of the
Academy, or at a garden-party. In point of fact it is, if anywhere,
everywhere, and the only thing that can certainly be stated about it is
that those who think about it at all, think that it is just a little way
ahead, and thus declare themselves to be snobs or ineffectual climbers.
But those who really make Society are not those who think about it, but
Are it, just because they live the life in which their birth and their
circumstances have placed them, with simplicity of mind and enjoyment.
Society does not live in a spasm of social efforts, it lives perfectly
naturally and without self-consciousness. It is impossible to make
anything of your environment if you are always wishing to be somewhere
else, and you will make nothing of any environment at all, unless you
are at ease there. Indeed the big S of Society is really the invention
of the snobbish folk who are not friends with their surroundings, and
that in part, at any rate, is why the loquacious pessimist is so
unrelenting towards it.
Society, then, and in special Smart Society, as it exists in the minds
of the praisers of past time and of snobs, is a perennial phantom, which
is the chief reason why none of them can be forced or can succeed in
getting into it. As they conceive of it, it is no more than a Will o’
the Wisp, which, if they pursue it, merely leads them on through miry
ways to find themselves in the end pursuing nothing at all, and
hopelessly bogged in the marshes of their own imagination. That society
exists all the world over is, luckily, perfectly true, but this peculiar
and odious conception of it is the invention of those who want to get
into it and of those who fulminate against it. Indeed it is almost
allowable to wonder whether these two classes are not really one, for it
is impossible to acquit some of its bitterest enemies of a certain hint
of envy in their outpourings, a grain of curiosity in their commination
services.
The pity of it is that they will not rest from these strivings, or
realize that what they pursue (either with longings or vituperation)
exists only in their own excited brains. Each has his feverish dream:
one pictures a heavenly Salem of dukes and duchesses, another a swimming
bath full of champagne and paved with ortolans, another an Elysium where
infinite bridge consumes the night, and continual changing of your dress
the day. These conditions have no existence; they are Wills o’ the Wisp.
There does not exist in the world a Smarter Set (to retain the beloved
old snobbism) than a circle of friends who, with definite aims of their
own, and tastes that are not copied from other people, enjoy themselves
and are at ease with each other, not being snobs on the one hand or
grousers on the other. All other ideas of Smart Sets, whether in London
or Manchester or the Fiji Islands, are mere moonshine: the only Smart
Set that ever existed or ever will exist is that of uncensorious and
simple people who have the sense to appreciate the blessings they so
richly enjoy. Of these Smart Sets there are many, but they are not the
Smart Sets or the capital-lettered Society that are usually meant when
allusion is made to them.
But somehow the notion of the existence of ‘A Smart Set’ or Society with
a big S is so deep-rooted that it will be well to examine the evidence
for its existence before labelling it ‘Bad Meat,’ to be destroyed by the
Board of Moral Health. The evidence in favour of its existence (if they
insist on it) is derivable from three possible sources:
(i.) First-hand evidence of those who have witnessed or partaken in
these ungodly orgies.
(ii.) Report.
(iii.) Reporters.
Now the purveyors of the intelligence, those who distribute it, are
largely the praisers of past time, who so persistently attack it and
paint such lurid pictures of its Neronism. But they must have got their
information from somewhere (unless we are reluctantly compelled to
suppose they made it up) and they can have got it from no other sources
than those specified above.
But on their own fervent asseverations they have never so much as set
foot in these Medmenham Abbeys, and if their information is derived
directly from the Abbeys, it must have been conveyed either by the
revellers themselves, by their valets and ladies’ maids, or have grown
out of the Tranby Croft trial. It is unlikely that the revellers should
have recounted the story of their shame to those sleuth-hounds on the
trail of decadence, and if we rule out the Tranby Croft trial as not
covering all that the sleuth-hounds say about Smart Life, we must
conclude that they must have induced (no doubt with suitable
remuneration) the gentleman’s gentleman and the lady’s lady to say what
their owners did and when they went to bed. But not for a moment can we
believe that these distinguished scribes resorted to such a trick. The
statement of the proposition shows how incredible it is, for these
high-minded moralists simply _could_ not have applied for the knowledge
of ‘sich goings on’ from chattering servants.
First-hand evidence, then, being ruled out, the purveyors may have
derived their information from report. Here the baffled aspirants to the
social distinction of being Smart may have helped them. But still such
knowledge if worth anything must be based on something, and if on report
it is merely the more valueless for having gone through so many mouths.
We are left then with the question of evidence derived from reporters,
and here I think we touch the source of the appalling state of things
pictured by the loquacious pessimist. The delightful anonymous author of
the Londoner’s Log-book, has grouped the organs of those who chronicle
social happenings under the title of Classy Cuttings, and it is from
these columns that we must conclude that the praisers of past time
derive their awful information. It is they who give to the thirsty
public the details of the menu of the supper that followed the dance,
and hint how great were the losings of a certain Countess who lives not
a hundred miles from B-lgr-v-Sq-r-, when she played poker at St-l-n-.
But, does that sort of information carry the required conviction? Indeed
it only carries conviction of the lamb-like credulity of the person who
believes it. Once upon a time an eminent and excellent lady revealed to
a horrified audience that the Smart Set habitually drank what she called
‘White Cup’ at tea (sensation). It sounded thoroughly Neronian, but lost
its impressiveness when the further revelation was made that at a
tennis-party certain individuals had been so lost to all sense of
decency as to partake of hock and soda instead of tea and cream.
It is on such foundations, columned by Classy Cuttings, that the
praisers of past time build the Old Bailey, where, bewigged and berobed,
they so solemnly pronounce the extreme sentence on Smart Sets and
Society. We must not deny to their summing-up something of the
gorgeously Oriental vocabulary of Ouida, though we cannot allow them
much share in her wit. She told in the guise of fiction the sort of
thing which the praisers of past time--after consulting Classy
Cuttings--expect us to accept as facts; she and Classy Cuttings mixed
the effervescent beverage which they allow to get flat, and then label
it the beef-tea of Fact. And when we are offered these fantastic
imaginings and are assured that the lurid pictures are positively
photographic in their accuracy, all our pleasure, as readers, is gone,
and we expire with a few hollow yawns. We had hoped it was Ouida, but to
our unspeakable dismay we are told that it is all Too True. Not being
able to swallow that, we can but remember the story of Dr. Johnson and
the hot potato.
_Tempora mutantur_, and unless we change with them we shall never grasp
the true values of the marching years. Society (with a final curse on
the large S) changes, and the changes represent on the whole the opinion
of people who are on the right lines. The praisers of past time have
cried ‘Wolf’ too often with regard to the decadence they invariably
detect in the present time, and until we are more certain that at last
the wolf is really there, it is wiser to push along, than to trust in
the denunciations of those who, firmly immured in the sedan-chairs of
sixty years ago, squint through the chinks of their lowered blinds
(lowered, lest they behold vanity) at the crowd they do not know, and
the bustle that they altogether fail to understand. In their day they
kicked up their heels much higher than their grandmammas approved. They
disregarded the denunciations of their elders then, and they must not be
surprised if the younger generation, whose antics their creaking joints
and croaking minds are unable to imitate, think of them as antique and
peevish progenitors now. The arts of fifty years ago are doubtless
theirs, all except the art of gracefully retiring. Instead, the more
accomplished of them, since their loquacity no longer can hold an
audience, proceed to volumes of uncomprehending memoirs. As long as they
stick to the past, their recollections often possess an old-world
fragrance as of lavender-bags shut in disused Victorian wardrobes, but
when they come to the present the lavender-scent fades, and they reek of
brimstone and burning. A grandmamma, talking of past days, is a
delightful and adorable member of any circle, but when she laments the
dangerous speed at which trains go nowadays, every one younger than she
feels she does not quite understand. And if, getting her information
from fiction (as the praisers of past days do from the columns of Classy
Cuttings), she tells us that motors habitually run over a hundred
thousand people a day in the streets of London, the younger folk, with
the kindness characteristic of youth, merely shout in her ear-trumpet,
‘Yes, Grandma, isn’t it awful?’ and wonder when her maid will fetch her
to go to bed.
It is on Grandma’s data that the praisers of past time form their
notions of society. She prides herself on never having been in one of
those horrible automobiles: the praisers pride themselves on never
having set foot within the doors of these unspeakable temples.
Apparently it is for this reason that they can tell us with precision
what happens there, except when they forget what they have previously
written, and flatly contradict themselves. Like the Fat Boy, the
loquacious pessimist wants to make our flesh creep, and sepulchrally
announces that he saw Miss Wardle and Mr. Tupman ‘a-kissing and
a-hugging.’ But unlike the Fat Boy, who really saw it, the pessimist
has only ‘heard tell of it’ in Classy Cuttings, and with Wardle we
should exclaim, ‘Pooh, he must have been dreaming.’ So he was, all alone
one night when nobody had asked him out to dinner, and falling into a
reverie proceeded to contrast the Sancta Simplicitas of the days when
everybody sailed along in a coach and four with those extravagant times
when he has to pay for his own mutton-chop, and rich folk save their
money to go in the twopenny tube. This sounded a little illogical, but
it would do, and refreshing himself with another drink of Classy
Cuttings, he lashed out at the poker-party at St-l-n-, by way of
punishing those who were not his hosts on that terrible occasion. Of
course he would not have gone in any case, since he has never and will
never set foot in those restaurants (not homes) of vice and
extravagance. One cannot help wondering whether, if he condescended to
go there, he would not feel a little kinder after ortolans and a
bleeding woodcock for tea, and with greater indulgence to the
degeneration he deplores, write a few pages about Progress instead of
Decadence. But who knows? The ortolans might disagree with him, and he
would become unkinder than ever.
Possibly all is for the best.