‘Ses divertissements sont infiniment moins raisonnables que
ses ennuis.’—PASCAL.
A brilliant and daring thinker lately published some admirable papers
called ‘Under the Yoke of the Butterflies.’ The only thing which I would
have changed in those delightful satires would have been the title.
There are no butterflies in this fast, furious and fussy age. They all
died with the eighteenth century, or if a few still lingered on into
this, they perished forever with the dandies. The butterfly is a
creature of the most perfect taste, arrayed in the most harmonious
colours: the butterfly is always graceful, leisurely, aerial, unerring
in its selection of fragrance and freshness, lovely as the summer day
through which it floats. The dominant classes of the present day have
nothing in the least degree akin to the butterflies; would to Heaven
that they had! Their pleasures would be more elegant, their example more
artistic, their idleness more picturesque than these are now. They would
rest peacefully on their roses instead of nailing them to a ballroom
wall; they would hover happily above their lilies and carnations without
throwing them about in dust and dirt at carnivals.
Butterflies never congregate in swarms; it is only locusts which do
that. Butterflies linger with languorous movement, always softly
rhythmical and undulating even when most rapid, through the sunny air
above the blossoming boughs. The locust is jammed together in a serried
host, and tears breathlessly forward without knowing in the least why or
where he goes, except that he must move on and must devour. There is
considerable analogy between the locust and society; none between
society and the butterfly. But be the yoke called what it will, it lies
heavily on the world, and there is no strength in the strongest
sufficient to lift it up and cast it off, for its iron is Custom and its
ropes are Foolishness and Bad Example, and what is termed Civilisation
carries it as the steer carries the nose-ring and the neck-beam.
Some clever people have of late been writing a great deal about society,
taking English society as their especial theme. But there are certain
facts and features in all modern society which they do not touch:
perhaps they are too polite, or too politic. In the first place they
seem to except, even whilst attacking them, smart people as elegant
people, and to confuse the two together: the two words are synonymous in
their minds, but are far from being so in reality. Many leaders of the
smart sets are wholly unrefined in taste, loud in manner, and followed
merely because they please certain personages, spend or seem to spend
profusely, and are seen at all the conspicuous gatherings of the season
in London and wherever else society congregates. This is why the smart
sets have so little refining influence on society. They may be common,
even vulgar; it is not necessary even for them to speak grammatically;
if they give real jewels with their cotillon toys and have a perfect
artist at the head of their kitchens, they can become ‘smart,’ and
receive royalty as much and as often as they please. The horrible word
smart has been invented on purpose to express this: smartness has been
borrowed from the vocabulary of the kitchenmaids to express something
which is at the top of the fashion, without being necessarily either
well born or well bred. Smart people may be both the latter, but it is
not necessary that they should be either. They may be smart by mere
force of chance, impudence, charm, or the faculty of making a royal
bored one laugh.
It is, therefore, impossible for the smart people to have much influence
for good on the culture and manners of the society they dominate. A
_beau monde_, really exclusive, elegant and of high culture, not to be
bought by any amount of mere riches or display, would have a great
refining influence on manner and culture, and its morality, or lack of
it, would not matter much. Indeed, society cannot be an accurate judge
of morality; the naughty clever people know well how to keep their
pleasant sins unseen; the candid, warm-hearted people always sin the
sole sin which really injures anybody—they get found out. ‘You may break
all the ten commandments every day if you like,’ said Whyte Melville,
‘provided only you observe the eleventh, “Thou shalt not be found out.”’
There is a morality or immorality, that of the passions, with which
society ought to have little or nothing to do; but there is another kind
with which it should have a good deal to do, _i.e._, the low standard of
honour and principle which allows persons in high place to take up
_richards_ for sheer sake of their wealth, and go to houses which have
nothing to recommend them except the fact that convenient rendezvous may
be arranged at them, or gambling easily prosecuted in them. But it is
not society as constituted at the present year of grace which will have
either the courage or the character to do this. Theoretically, it may
condemn what it calls immorality and gambling, but it will always
arrange its house-party in accord with the affinities which it
sedulously remembers and ostensibly ignores, and will allow bac’ to
follow coffee after dinner rather than illustrious persons should pack
up and refuse to return.
At risk of arousing the censure of readers, I confess that I would leave
to society a very large liberty in the matter of its morality or
immorality, if it would only justify its existence by any originality,
any grace, any true light and loveliness. In the face of its foes lying
grimly waiting for it, with explosives in their pockets, society should
justify its own existence by its own beauty, delicacy and excellence of
choice and taste. It should, as Auberon Herbert has said, be a centre
whence light should radiate upon the rest of the world. But one can only
give what one has, and as it has no clear light or real joy within
itself it cannot diffuse them, and in all probability never will. ‘The
Souls’ do, we know, strive in their excellent intentions and their
praiseworthy faith to produce them, but they are too few in numbers, and
are already too tightly caught in the tyres of the great existing
machinery to be able to do much towards this end. After all, a society
does but represent the temper of the age in which it exists, and the
faults of the society of our time are the faults of that time itself;
they are its snobbishness, its greed, its haste, its slavish adoration
of a royalty which is wholly out of time and keeping with it, and of a
wealth of which it asks neither the origin nor the solidity, and which
it is content only to borrow and bask in as pigs in mud.
It is not luxury which is enervating; it is over-eating, over-smoking,
and the poisoned atmosphere of crowded rooms. Edmond de Goncourt likes
best to write in a grey, bare room which contains nothing to suggest an
idea or distract the imagination. But few artists or poets would desire
such an _entourage_. Beauty is always inspiration. There is nothing in a
soft seat, a fragrant atmosphere, a well-regulated temperature, a
delicate dinner, to banish high thought; on the contrary, the more
refined and lovely the place the happier and more productive ought to be
the mind. Beautiful things can be created independently of place; but
the creator of them suffers when he can enjoy beauty only in his dreams.
I do not think that the rich enjoy beauty one whit more than the poor in
this day. They are in too great a hurry to do so. There is no artistic
enjoyment without repose. Their beautiful rooms are scarcely seen by
them except when filled with a throng. Their beautiful gardens and parks
are visited by them rarely and reluctantly. Their treasures of art give
them no pleasure unless they believe them unique, unequalled. Their
days, which might be beautiful, are crammed with incessant engagements,
and choked with almost incessant eating.
In England the heavy breakfasts, the ponderous luncheons, the long,
tedious dinners, not to speak of the afternoon teas and the liqueurs and
spirits before bedtime, fill up more than half the waking hours;
‘stoking,’ as it is elegantly called, is the one joy which never palls
on the human machine, until he pays for it with dyspepsia and gout.
People who live habitually well should be capable of denying their
appetites enough to pass from London to Paris, or Paris to London,
without wanting to eat and drink. But in point of fact they never dream
of such denial of the flesh, and they get out at the buffets of Boulogne
and Amiens with alacrity, or order both breakfast and dinner, with wines
at choice, in the club-train. A _train de luxe_ is, by the way, the
epitome and portrait of modern society; it provides everything for the
appetite; it gives cushions, newspapers and iced drinks; it whirls the
traveller rapidly from capital to capital; but the steam is in his
nostrils, the cinder dust is in his eyes, and the roar of the rattling
wheels is in his ears. I do not think that plain living and high
thinking are a necessary alliance. Good food, delicate and rich, is like
luxury; it should not be shunned, but enjoyed. It is one of the best
products of what is called civilisation, and should be duly appreciated
by all those who can command it. But feeding should not occupy the
exaggerated amount of time which is given to it in society, nor cost the
enormous amount of money which is at present spent on it.
Luxury in itself is a most excellent thing, and I would fain see it more
general, as the luxury of the bath was in Imperial Rome open to one and
all; with the water streaming over the shining silver and snowy marbles,
and the beauty of porphyry and jade and agate gleaming under the silken
awning, alike for plebeian and patrician. It is not for its luxury for a
moment that I would rebuke the modern world: but for its ugly habits,
its ugly clothes, its ugly hurry-skurry, whereby it so grossly
disfigures, and through which it scarcely even perceives or enjoys the
agreeable things around it.
Luxury is the product and result of all the more delicate inventions and
combinations of human intelligence and handicraft. To refuse its graces
and comforts would be as unwise as to use a rudely-sharpened flint
instead of a good table-knife. A far more lamentable fact than the
existence of luxury is that it is so little enjoyed and so rarely made
general. We deliberately surrender the enjoyment of the luxury of good
cooking because we most stupidly mix up eating with talking, and lose
the subtle and fine flavours of our best dishes because we consider
ourselves obliged to converse with somebody on our right or our left
whilst we eat them. We neutralise the exquisite odours of our finest
flowers by the scent of wines and smoking dishes. We spoil our
masterpieces of art by putting them together pell-mell in our rooms,
smothered under a discordant mingling of different objects and various
styles. We allow nicotines to poison the breath of our men and women. We
desire a crowd on our stairs and a crush in our rooms as evidence of our
popularity and our distinction. We cannot support eight days of the
country without a saturnalia of slaughter. We are so tormented by the
desire to pack forty-eight hours into twenty-four, that we gobble our
time up breathlessly without tasting its flavour, as a greedy schoolboy
gobbles up stolen pears without peeling them. Of the true delights of
conversation, leisure, thought, art and solitude, society _en masse_ has
hardly more idea than a flock of geese has of Greek. There is in the
social atmosphere, in the social life of what is called ‘the world,’ a
subtle and intoxicating influence which is like a mixture of champagne
and opium, and has this in common with the narcotic, that it is very
difficult and depressing to the taker thereof to leave it off and do
without it. As La Bruyère said of the court life of his time, it does
not make us happy but it makes us unable to find happiness elsewhere.
After a full and feverish season we have all known the reaction which
follows on the return to a quiet life. There is a magnetic attraction in
the great giddy gyrations of fashionable and political life. To cede to
this magnetism for a while may be highly beneficial; but to make of it
the vital necessity of existence, as men and women of the world now do,
is as fatal as the incessant use of any other stimulant or opiate.
The great malady of the age is the absolute inability to support
solitude, or to endure silence.
Statesmanship is obscured in babbling speech; art and literature
are represented by mere hurried impressions snatched from
unwillingly-accorded moments of a detested isolation; life is
lived in a throng, in a rush, in a gallop; the day was lost to
Titus if it did not record a good action; the day is lost to the
modern man and woman unless it be spent in a mob. The horror of
being alone amounts in our time to a disease. To be left without
anybody else to amuse it fills the modern mind with terror. ‘La
solitude n’effraie pas le penseur: il y a toujours quelqu’un dans
la chambre,’ a witty writer has said; but it is the wit as well as
the fool in this day who flies from his own company; it is the
artist as well as the dandy who seeks the boulevard and the crowd.
There is nothing more costly than this hatred of one’s own company, than
this lack of resources and occupations independent of other persons.
What ruins ninety-nine households out of a hundred is the expense of
continual visiting and inviting. Everybody detests entertaining, but as
they all know that they must receive to be received, and they cannot
bring themselves to support solitude, people ruin themselves in
entertainment. There can scarcely be a more terrible sign of decadence
than the indifference with which the _grands de la terre_ are everywhere
selling their collections and their libraries. Instead of altering the
excessive display and expenditure which impoverish them, and denying
themselves that incessant amusement which they have grown to consider a
necessity, they choose to sell the books, the pictures and the
manuscripts which are the chief glories of their homes; often they even
sell also their ancestral woods.
This day, as I write, great estates which have been in the same English
family for six hundred years are going to the hammer. This ghastly
necessity may be in part brought about by agricultural depression, but
it is far more probably due to the way of living of the times which must
exhaust all fortunes based on land. If men and women were content to
dwell on their estates, without great display or frequent entertainment,
their incomes would suffice in many cases. It is not the old home which
ruins them: it is the London house with its incessant expenditure, the
house-parties with their replica of London, the women’s toilettes, the
men’s shooting and racing and gaming, the Nile boat, the Cairene winter,
the weeks at Monte Carlo, the Scotch moors, the incessant, breathless
round of intermingled sport and pleasure danced on the thin ice of debt,
and kept up frequently for mere appearances’ sake, without any genuine
enjoyment, only from a kind of false shame and a real inability to
endure life out of a crowd.
There is a stimulant and a drug, as I have said, in the curious mixture
of excitement and _ennui_, of animation and fatigue, produced by
society, and without this mixture the man and woman of the world cannot
exist; and to find the purchase-money of this drug is what impoverishes
them, and makes them indifferent to their own degradation, and sends
their beautiful old woods and old books and old pictures to the shameful
uproar of the sale-rooms. If the passion for the slaughter of tame
creatures which is almost an insanity, so absorbing and so dominant is
it, could be done away with in England, and the old houses be really
lived in by their owners all the year round with genuine affection and
scholarly taste, as they were lived in by many families in Stuart and
Georgian days, their influence over the counties and the villages would
be incalculable and admirable, as Mr Auberon Herbert and Mr Frederick
Greenwood have recently said; and the benefit accruing to the fortunes
of the nobles and gentry would be not less.
It is not only in England that men have become bored by and neglectful
of their great estates. All over Italy stand magnificent villas left to
decay or tenanted by peasants, the lizard creeping in the crevices of
forgotten frescoes, the wild vine climbing over the marbles of abandoned
sculptures, the oranges and the medlars falling ungathered on the
mosaics of the mighty and desolate courts. Why is this? In the earlier
centuries men and women loved pleasure well, and had few scruples; yet
they loved and honoured their country houses, and were happy in their
fragrant alleys and their storied chambers, and spent magnificently on
their adornment and enrichment with a noble pride. It is only now in the
latest years of the nineteenth century that these superb places are left
all over Europe to dust, decay, and slow but sure desolation, whilst the
owners spend their time in play or speculation, call for bocks and
brandies in the club-rooms of the world, and buy shares in mushroom
building companies.
Marion Crawford observes dryly ‘that it is useless to deny the enormous
influence of brandy and games of chance on the men of the present day.’
It is indeed so useless that no one who knows anything of our society
would dream of attempting to deny it, and if we substitute morphia for
brandy, we may say much the same of a large proportion of the women of
the present day. Drinking and gambling, in some form or another, is the
most general vice of the cultured world, which censures the island
labourer for his beer and skittles, and condemns the continental workman
for his absinthe and lotteries. It is a strange form of progress which
makes educated people incapable of resisting the paltry pleasures of the
green-table and the glass; a strange form of culture which ends at the
spirit frame, the playing cards, and the cigar box. The poor Japanese
coolie amongst the lilies and lilacs of his little garden is surely
nearer both culture and progress than the drinker and the gambler of the
modern clubs.
Reflect on the enormous cost of a boy’s education when he belongs to the
higher strata of social life, and reflect, also, that as soon as he
becomes his own master he will, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
take advantage of his liberty only to do what Crawford’s young Don
Orsino does, _i.e._, drink brandy, gamble at bac’, and try to gain
admittance into the larger gaming of the Bourses. It will certainly be
allowed by any dispassionate judge, that a better result might be
arrived at with such exorbitant cost; that a nobler animal ought to be
produced by such elaborate and wholly useless training.
Drinking and gambling (in varied forms it is true, but in essence always
the same) are the staple delights of modern life, whether in the rude
western shanty of the navvy, the miner and the digger, or in the
luxurious card-rooms of the clubs and the country houses of the older
world. We have even turned all the rest of creation into living dice for
us, and the horse trots or gallops, the dog is fastened to the
show-bench, the pigeon flies from the trap, even the rat fights the
terrier that our fevered pulses may beat still quicker in the unholy
agitation of a gamester’s greed.
We are great gamblers, and the gambler is always a strangely twisted
mixture of extravagance and meanness. Expenditure is not generosity; we
are lavish but we are not liberal; we will waste two thousand pounds on
an entertainment, but we cannot spare five pounds for a friend in
distress. For the most part we live not only up to but far beyond our
incomes, and the necessary result is miserliness in small things and to
those dependent on us.
‘Ses divertissements sont infiniments moins raisonnables que ses
ennuis,’ says Pascal of the society of his day, and the statement stands
good of our own. Society has no pleasure which is graceful or elevating,
except music; but music listened to in a crowd loses half its influence;
and it is an insult to the most spiritual of all the arts to regard it,
as it is regarded in society, as a mere interlude betwixt dinner and the
card-table. There is little except music which is beautiful in the
pageantries of this day. A ball is still a pretty sight if it takes
place in a great house, and if not too many people have been invited.
But except this, and this only in a great house, all entertainments are
unsightly. No decoration of a dinner-table, no gold plate, and orchidæ,
and electric light, and old china can make even tolerable, artistically
speaking, the sight of men and women sitting bolt upright close together
taking their soup around it. A full concert-room, lecture-room, church,
are a hideous sight. A garden party in fair weather and fine grounds
alone has a certain grace and charm; but garden parties, like all other
modern spectacles, are spoilt by the attire of the men, the most
frightful, grotesque and disgraceful male costume which the world has
ever seen. When the archæologists of the future dig up one of our bronze
statues in trousers they will have no need to go further for evidence of
the ineptitude and idiotcy of the age. What our historians call the dark
ages had costumes, alike for the villein and the seigneur, adapted to
their needs, serviceable, picturesque and comely; this age alone, which
vaunts its superiority, has a clothing for its men which is at once
utterly unsightly, unhealthy, and so constructed that all the bodily
beauty of an Apollo or an Achilles would be obscured, caricatured, and
deformed by it. The full height of its absurdity is reached when the
glazier comes in his black suit to mend your windows, and brings his
working clothes in a bundle to be put on ere he works and put off ere he
goes into the street. The political incapacity with which the natives of
Ireland are charged by English statesmen never seemed to me so
conclusively proven as by their persistence in wearing ragged tail-coats
and battered tall hats in their stony fields and on their sodden bogs. A
man who cannot clothe his own person reasonably is surely a man
incapable of legislating for himself and for his kind. This rule,
however, if acted on, would disfranchise Europe and the United States.
To a society which had any true perception of beauty, grace, or
elegance, the masher would be impossible; the shoulder-handshake, the
tall hat, the eternal cigarette, the stiff collar, the dead birds on the
ball-dresses and bonnets, the perspiring struggles of the sexes on the
tennis ground, and a thousand other similar things would not be for a
moment endured. To a society which had any high standard of refinement
such entertainments as are appropriately called ‘crushes’ would be
insupportable; the presence and the speeches of women on public
platforms would be intolerable; all the enormities of the racecourse
would be abhorrent; its fine ladies would no more wear dead
humming-birds upon their gowns than they would wear the entrails of dead
cats; its fine gentlemen would no more gather together to murder
hand-fed pheasants than they would shoot kittens or canaries; to a truly
elegant society everything barbarous, grotesque and ungraceful would be
impossible.
An incessant and _maladif_ restlessness has become the chief
characteristic of all cultured society nowadays: it is accounted a
calamity beyond human endurance to be six months at a time in one place;
to remain a year would be considered cause for suicide. The
dissatisfaction and feverishness which are the diseases of the period
are attributed to place most wrongly, for change of place does not cure
them and only alleviates them temporarily and briefly. Here, again, the
royal personages are the first offenders and the worst examples. They
are never still. They are never content. They are incessantly
discovering pretexts for conveying their royal persons here and there,
to and fro, in ceaseless, useless, costly and foolish journeys.
Every event in their lives is a cause or an excuse for their indulgence
in the _pérégrinomanie_; if they are well, they want change of scene; if
they are ill, they want change of air; if they suffer a bereavement,
nothing can console them except some agreeable foreign strand; and the
deaths, births and marriages of their innumerable relations furnish them
with continual and convenient reasons for incessant gyrations. In all
these multiplied and endless shiftings of place and person the
photographs fly about in showers, and the gold and silver offerings are
tendered in return on bended knees.
It must be confessed that royalty confirms and keeps up many usages and
obligations of society which are absurd and unpleasant, and which
without royal support would die a natural death.
What can be more absurd, more childish, and more utter waste of money
than the salutes with which it is the custom to celebrate the going and
coming, the births and the deaths, of these royal people? The savage who
expresses his joy by discharging his rusty musket is deemed a silly
creature; but the civilised nation is less excusably silly which
expresses its pleasure, its grief, and its homage by means of this hard,
ugly, unpleasant noise which has no sense in it, and blows away in smoke
vast sums of money which might easily be better spent. It is a barbarous
practice, and it is difficult to comprehend a civilised world tamely
submitting to its continuance.
The most vulgar form of salutation, the shake-hands, has been adopted
and generalised by princes, until it is now usual in countries where it
was unknown in the beginning of the century. Nothing can be more
ludicrous and ungraceful, or more disagreeable, than the ‘pump-handling’
which is common in all ranks of society, and which great personages
might easily have abolished altogether. They think it makes them
popular, and so they resort to it on every suitable and unsuitable
occasion. There can be no possible reason why people should go through
this unpleasant action, and few sights are more absurd than to see two
elderly gentlemen solemnly sawing each other’s arms up and down as they
meet before the doorsteps of their club. The slight smile and scarcely
perceptible bend of the head which are all with which well-bred people
recognise their acquaintances at a reception or a ball, is fully
sufficient for all purposes of recognition at any period of the day, and
can amply preface conversation. The pressure of hands should be left to
lovers, or to friends in moments of impulses of emotion; on leave-taking
before, or on welcome after, a long absence. There are many men still in
Europe, not all old men either, who know how to greet a woman, and bend
low over her hand and touch it lightly with their lips; and how
graceful, how respectful, how suggestive of homage is that courtly
salutation! It is the fault of women that it has become the exception,
not the rule.
If we had Charles the First on the throne of England, and Louis Quatorze
on the throne of France, whatever political difficulties might come of
it, manners would certainly be considerably altered, corrected and
refined. The influence of some great gentleman might do much to purge
the coarseness and commonness of society out of it; but such a personage
does not exist, and if he did exist, the Augean stable would probably be
too much for his strength. He would retire, like Beckford, to some
Fonthill and build a Chinese Wall between him and the world.
But alas! the vulgarity of the age is at its highest in high places. The
position of sovereigns and their descendants is one which should at
least allow them to be the first gentry of their countries in feeling as
they are in precedence and etiquette; they might, were they capable of
it, set an example of grace, of elegance, and of purity of taste. Strong
as is the revolutionary leaven amongst the masses, the force of snobbism
is stronger still, and all habits and examples which come from the
palace are followed by the people with eager and obsequious servility.
If, when princes and princesses were united in wedlock, they ordained
‘No presents,’ the abominable blackmail levied by betrothed people on
their acquaintances would cease to be fashionable, and would soon become
‘parcel and portion of the dreadful past.’ If, when princes and
princesses paid the debt of nature, the Court officials sent out the
decree ‘No flowers,’ all other classes would take example, and the
horrible, senseless barbarism of piling a mass of decaying wreaths and
floral crosses upon a coffin and a grave would pass to the limbo of all
other extinct barbaric and grotesque customs. But they are careful to do
nothing of the kind. The bridal gifts are too welcome to them; and the
funeral baked meats are too savoury; and all the royal people all over
Europe unite in keeping up these tributes levied from a groaning world.
Modern generations have made both marriage and death more absurd, more
banal, and more vulgar than any other period ever contrived to do; and
it is not modern princes who will endeavour to render either of them
simple, natural and dignified, for the essence and object of all royal
life in modern times is vulgarity, _i.e._, publicity.
Of all spectacles which society flocks to see, it may certainly be said
that the funeral and the wedding are the most intolerably coarse and
clumsy. There is indeed a curious and comical likeness between these
two. Both take place in a crowd; both are the cause for extortion and
expenditure; both are attended unwillingly and saluted with false
formulæ of compliment; both are ‘seen out’ and ‘got through’ with sighs
of relief from the spectators; and both are celebrated with the
sacrifice of many myriads of flowers crucified in artificial shapes in
their honour.
Hymen and Pallida Mors alike grin behind the costly and senseless
orchids and the sweet dying roses and lilies of the jubilant nurseryman.
The princes and the tradespeople have in each case decreed that this
shall be so; and society has not will or wisdom enough to resist the
decree.
A poet died not long ago and left amongst his farewell injunctions the
bidding to put no flowers on his bier. The wise press and public
exclaimed, ‘How strange that a poet should hate flowers!’ Poor fools! He
loved them so deeply, so intensely, that the tears would start to his
eyes when he beheld the first daffodils of the year, or leaned his lips
on the cool pallor of a cluster of tea roses. It was because he loved
them so well that he forbade their crucified beauty being squandered, to
fade and rot upon his coffin. Every true lover of flowers would feel the
same. Nothing more disgusting and more offensive can be imagined than
the cardboard and wires on which the tortured blossoms are fastened in
various shapes to languish in the heated atmosphere of a _chambre
ardente_, or in the sickly and oppressive air of a mortuary chamber. All
the designs which serve to symbolise the loves of cook and potboy on St
Valentine’s Day are now pressed into the service of the princely or
noble mourners; harps, crowns, crosses, hearts, lyres, and all the trash
of the vulgarest sentiment are considered touching and exquisite when
hung before a royal catafalque or heaped upon a triple coffin of wood,
lead and velvet. In all these grotesque and vulgar shapes the innocent
blossoms are nailed, gummed, or wired by workpeople, grinning and
smoking as they work, and the whole mass is heaped together on bier, in
crypt, or on monument, and left to rot and wither in sickening emblem of
the greater corruption which it covers.
The fresh-gathered flowers laid by maidens’ hands on the wet hair of
Ophelia, or the white breast of Juliet, might have beauty both natural
and symbolical. One spray of some best-loved blossom, placed by some
best-loved hand on the silenced heart, may have the meaning and be the
emblem of the deepest feeling. To put softly down upon a bed of moss and
rose-leaves the dead white limbs of a little child may have fitness and
beauty in the act. To go in the dusk of dawn into the wet, green ways of
gardens, silent save for the call of waking birds, and gather some bud
or leaf which was dear to our lost love, and bear it within to lie with
him where we can never console or caress him in his eternal solitude:
this may be an impulse tender and natural even in those first hours of
bereavement. But to arise from our woe to order a florist to make a harp
of lilies with strings of gold or silver wire; to stay our tears, to
break the seals of boxes come by rail from Nice and Grasse and Cannes:
this indeed is to fall into bathos beside which the rudest funeral
customs of the savage look respectable and dignified.
When we realise what death is and what it means: that never will those
lips touch ours again; that never will that voice again caress our ear;
that never more will our inmost thoughts be mirrored in those eyes; that
never more shall we say, ‘Shall we do this to-day? shall we do that
to-morrow?’ that never more can we go together through the grass of
spring, or together watch the sun drop down behind the hills; that never
can we ask pardon if our love were fretful, human, weak; that never more
can there be communion or comprehension; that all is silent, lonely,
ended, an unchanging and unchangeable desolation:—when we realise this,
I say, and think that there are persons who, left to this awful
solitude, can give orders to floral tradesmen and take comfort in toys
of cardboard and wire, we may be pardoned if we feel that the most
bitter scorn of the cynic for human nature is flagellation too merciful
for its triviality and folly.
Truly, in nine times out of ten it is but a conventional and unreal
sorrow which thus expresses itself; truly, out of the millions of deaths
which take place there are but few which create deep and abiding grief;
still, the association of these elaborate artificial wreaths and
garlands, these stiff and crucified blossoms, with the tomb would only
be possible to the most vulgar and insensible of generations, even as
decoration, even as mere common-place compliment, whilst to the true
lover of flowers they must be ever a distressing outrage.
In Lopez de Vega’s _Diego de Alcala_ the humble servant of a poor
hermit, lowliest of the low, begs pardon of the flowers which he gathers
for the chapel, and begs them to forgive him for taking them away from
their beloved meadows. This is a worthier attitude before those divine
children of the dews and sun than the indifference of the lovers of the
flower carnival or the funeral pageant.
If a daisy were but as scarce as a diamond, how would the multitudes
rush to adore the little golden-eyed star in the grass!
One of the most exquisitely beautiful things I ever saw in my life was a
thick tuft of harebell glittering all over with dew on a sunny morning
where it grew on a mossy wall. It was not worth sixpence, yet it was a
thing to kneel down before and adore and remember reverently for
evermore.
Who will deliver us, asks George Sala, from the fashionable bridal, from
the eternal ivory satin and the ghastly orange-blossom, and the two
little shavers masquerading as pages?
The roughest and rudest marriage forms of savage nations are less
offensive than those which are the received and admired custom of the
civilised world. There cannot be a more Philistian jumble of greed,
show, indecency and extravagance than are compressed into the marriage
festivities of the cities of Europe and America. When the nuptials are
solemnised in the country, something of country simplicity and freshness
may enter into them, but almost all fashionable weddings are now taken
to the cities, because a huge enough crowd cannot be gathered together
even in the biggest of big country houses. Often the persons concerned
go to an hotel, or borrow a friend’s mansion for the celebration of the
auspicious event.
Year after year the same trivial and tiresome usage, the same vulgar and
extravagant customs, the same barbarous and uncouth ceremonies prevail,
and are accepted as sacred and unalterable law. The most intimate, the
most delicate, the most personal actions and emotions of life are set
out in the full glare of light in the most unscreened and most unsparing
publicity; and no one sees the odious and disgusting coarseness of it
all. The more sensitive and refined temperaments submit meekly to the
torture of its commands.
If marriage, so long as the institution lasts, could become in its
celebration that which decency and good taste would suggest, a simple
and sacred rite with neither publicity nor gaudy expenditure to profane
it, there might come, with such a change, similar alteration in other
ceremonies, and sentiment might have a chance to put in its modest plea
for place unfrightened by the loud beating of the brazen drums of
wealth. In all the annals of the social life of the world there has not
been anything so atrocious in vulgarity as a fashionable wedding,
whether viewed in its greedy pillaging of friends and acquaintances or
in its theatrical pomp of costume, of procession and of banquet. It is
the very apogee of bad taste, incongruity and indecency, from the coarse
words of its rites to its sputtering champagne, its unvaried orations,
and its idiotic expenditure. It is this publicity which is dear to the
soul of our Gaius and Gaia; for were it not so there would be more
special licences demanded, since these are not so costly that
gentle-people could not easily afford to have their marriage ceremony as
entirely private as they pleased. But they would not feel any pleasure
at privacy; they despise it; they are always ready with gag and rouge
for the foot-lights; if they had not an audience the bride and
bridegroom would yawn in each other’s faces. Every ceremony duly repeats
and carefully imitates those which have preceded it. There is no
originality, there is no modesty, there is no dignity or reserve. The
plunder which is called ‘presents’ are laid out on exhibition, and the
feverish anxiety of every bride-elect is to get more presents than any
of her contemporaries. Even the in-door and out-door servants of each of
the two households have this shameless blackmail levied on them; and
gillies subscribe for a hunting-watch, and kitchen-maids contribute to
the purchase of a silver-framed mirror. Scarcely even is a royal or
aristocratic marriage announced than the laundries and the pantries are
ransacked for sovereigns and half-sovereigns to purchase some costly
article to be offered to their princely or noble employers. Imagine the
slaves of Augustus presenting him with a gold whistle, or the comedians
of Louis Quatorze offering him a silver cigar-box!
But all is fish which comes to the nets of the impecunious great folks
of the _fin de siècle_, and the unhappy households must submit and buy a
propitiatory gift out of their salaries. That households are notoriously
dishonest in our day is but a necessary consequence. Who can blame a
servant if, knowing the blackmail which will be levied on him, he
recoups himself with commissions levied in turn upon tradesmen, or
perquisites gleaned from the wine-cellars? It is said openly, though I
cannot declare with what truth, that all the gifts in gold and silver
and jewels which are offered to princes on their travels by loyal
corporations or adoring colonists are sold immediately, whilst all the
costly boxes and jewelled trifles which such princes are obliged by
custom to leave behind them wherever they have been received are
similarly disposed of by the greater number of their recipients. It is,
perhaps, the reason why royal donors so frequently limit themselves to
the cheap gift of a signed photograph. They know that photographs cannot
be offered to them in return.
The diffusion of German influence, which has been general over Europe
through the fatality which has seated Germans on all the thrones of
Europe, has had more than any other thing to do with the vulgarisation
of European society. The German eats in public, kisses in public, drags
all his emotions out into the public garden or coffee-house, makes
public his curious and nauseous mixture of sugar and salt, of jam and
pickles, alike in his sentiments and in his cookery, and praises
Providence and embraces his betrothed with equal unction under the trees
of the public square.
And the influence of courts being immense, socially and personally,
society throughout Europe has been Germanised; scholars love to point
out the far-reaching and deeply penetrating influence of the Greek and
Asiatic spirit upon Rome and Latium; historians in a time to come will
study as curiously the effect of the German influence on the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and that of royal houses upon nations in an
epoch when royalty drew near its end.
It is to German and royal influence that English society owes the
introduction of what are called silver and golden weddings, of which the
tinsel sentiment and the greedy motive are alike most unlovely. Gaius
and Gaia grown old, proclaim to all their world that they have lived
together for a quarter or a half century in order that this fact,
absolutely uninteresting to any one except themselves, may bring them a
shower of compliments and of gifts. They may very probably have had
nothing of union except its semblance; they may have led a long life of
bickering, wrangling and dissension; Gaius may have wished her at the
devil a thousand times, and Gaia may have opened his letters, paid his
debts out of her dower, and quarrelled with his tastes ever since their
nuptials: all this is of no matter whatever; the twenty-five or the
fifty years have gone by, and are therefore celebrated as one long hymn
of peace and harmony, the loving-cup is passed round, and blackmail is
levied on all their acquaintances. ‘Old as he is, he makes eyes at my
maid because she is young and fresh-coloured!’ says Gaia in her
confidante’s ear. ‘The damned old hag still pulls me up if I only look
at a pretty woman!’ grumbles Gaius in his club confidences. But they
smile and kiss and go before the audience at their golden wedding and
speak the epilogue of the dreary comedy which society has imposed on
them and which they have imposed on society. And the buffets of their
dining-hall are the richer by so many golden flagons and caskets and
salvers given by their admiring acquaintances, who are not their dupes
but who pretend to be so in that unending make-believe which accompanies
us from the nursery to the grave. The union may have been virtually a
separation for five-sixths of its term; the ill temper of the man or the
carping spirit of the woman, or any one of the other innumerable causes
of dissension which make dislike so much easier and more general than
affection, may have made of this ‘married life’ an everlasting apple of
discord blistering the lips which have been fastened to it.
Nevertheless, because they have not been publicly separated, the wedded
couple, secretly straining at their chains, are bound after a certain
term of years to receive the felicitations and the gifts of those around
them.
The grotesqueness of these celebrations does not seem to strike any one.
This century has but little humour. In a witty age these elderly wedded
pairs would be seen to be so comical, that laughter would blow out their
long-lit hymeneal torch, and forbid the middle-aged or aged lovers to
undraw the curtains of their nuptial couches. Love may wither in the
flesh, yet keep his heart alive maybe—yes, truly—but if Love be wise, he
will say nothing about his heart when his lips are faded.
Old men and women, with grandchildren by the hundred, and offspring of
fifty years old, should have perception enough of the ridiculous not to
speak of a union which has so many living witnesses to its fruitfulness.
The tenderness which may still unite two aged people who have climbed
the hill of life together, and are together descending its slope in the
grey of the coming night, may be one of the holiest, as it is certainly
the rarest, of human sentiments, but it is not one which can bear being
dragged out into the glare of publicity. What is respectable, and even
sacred, murmured between ‘John Anderson my jo, John,’ and his old wife
as they sit in the evening on the moss-grown wall of the churchyard,
where they will soon be laid side by side together for evermore, is
ridiculous and indecent when made the theme of after-dinner speeches and
newspaper paragraphs. No true feeling should ever be trumpeted abroad;
and the older men and women grow, the more bounden on them becomes the
reserve which can alone preserve their dignity. But dignity is the
quality in which the present period is most conspicuously deficient.
Those who possess it in public life are unpopular with the public; those
who possess it in private life are thought pretentious, or old-fashioned
and stiff-necked.
The French expression for being fashionable, _dans le train_, exactly
expresses what fashion now is. It is to be remarkable in a crowd indeed,
but still always in a crowd, rushing rapidly with that crowd, and no
longer attempting to lead, much less to stem it. Life lived at a gallop
may be, whilst we are in the first flight, great fun, but it is wholly
impossible that it should be very dignified. The cotillon cannot be the
minuet. The cotillon is sometimes a very pretty thing, and sometimes a
very diverting one, but it is always a romp. I would keep the cotillon,
but I would not force every one to join in it. Society does force every
one to do so, metaphorically speaking; you must either live out of the
world altogether or you must take the world’s amusements as you find
them, and they are nowadays terribly monotonous, and not seldom very
unintelligent, and a severe drain upon both wealth and health. Youth,
riches and beauty may have ‘a good time,’ because they contain in
themselves many elements of pleasure; but this ‘good time’ is at its
best not elegant and always feverish; it invents nothing, it satisfies
no ideal, it is full of slavish imitation and repetition, and it is
bored by tedious and stupid ceremonies which everyone execrates, but no
one has the courage to abolish or refuse to attend.
One is apt to believe that anarchy will sooner or later break up our
social life into chaos because it becomes so appalling to think that all
these silly and ugly forms of display and pompous frivolity will go on
for ever; that humanity will be for ever snobbishly prostrate before
princes, babyishly pleased with stars and crosses, grinningly joyful to
be packed together on a grand staircase, and idiotically impotent to
choose or to act with independence. There appears no possibility
whatever of society redressing, purifying, elevating itself; the
unsavoury crowd at the White House reception and the Elysées ball is
only still more hopelessly ridiculous and odious than the better-dressed
and better-mannered throng at St James’s or the Hofburg. The
office-holder in a republic has as many toadies and parasites as an
archduke or a _kronprinz_. The man who lives in a shanty built of empty
meat and biscuit tins on the plains of Nevada or New South Wales is by
many degrees a more degraded form of humanity than his brother who has
stayed amongst English wheat or Tuscan olives or French vines or German
pine-trees: many degrees more degraded, because infinitely coarser and
more brutal, and more hopelessly soaked in a sordid and hideous manner
of life. All the vices, meannesses and ignominies of the Old World
reproduce themselves in the so-called New World, and become more vulgar,
more ignoble, more despicable than in their original hemisphere. Under
the Southern Cross of the Australian skies, cant, snobbism, corruption,
venality, fraud, the worship of wealth _per se_, are more rampant, more
naked, and more vulgarly bedizened than beneath the stars of Ursa Major.
It is not from the mixture of Methodism, drunkenness, revolver-shooting,
wire-pulling, and the frantic expenditure of _richards_ who were navvies
or miners a week ago, that any superior light and leading, any
alteration for the better in social life can be ever looked for. All
that America and Australia will ever do will be to servilely reproduce
the follies and hopelessly vulgarise the habits of the older
civilisation of Europe.
What is decreasing, fading, disappearing more and more every year is
something more precious than any mere enjoyment or embellishment. It is
what we call high breeding; it is what we mean when we say that _bon
sang ne peut mentir_. All the unpurchasable, unteachable, indescribable
qualities and instincts which we imply when we say he or she has ‘race’
in him, are growing more and more rare through the continual alliance of
old families with new wealth. We understand the necessity of keeping the
blood of our racing and coursing animals pure, but we let their human
owners sully their stock with indifference so long as they can ‘marry
money,’ no matter how that money has been made. The effect is very
visible; as visible as the deterioration in the manners of the House of
Commons since neither culture nor courtesy are any longer exacted there,
and as the injury done to the House of Lords by allowing it to become a
retreat for retired and prosperous tradesmen.
It is reported that Ravachol, who was not especially sound at the core
himself, stated it as his opinion that society is so rotten that nothing
can be done with it except to destroy it. Most sober thinkers, who have
not Ravachol’s relish for the pastimes of crime, must yet be tempted to
agree with him. Who that knows anything at all of the inner working of
administrative life can respect any extant form of government? Who that
has studied the practical working of elective modes of choice can fail
to see that there is no true choice in their issues at all, only endless
wire-pulling? Who can deny that all the legislation in the world must
for ever be powerless to limit the _sub rosa_ influence of the
unscrupulous man? Who can deny that in the struggle for success, honesty
and independence and candour are dead-weights, suppleness and falsehood,
and the sly tact which bends the knee and oils the tongue, are the
surest qualities in any competitor? Who can frame any social system in
which the enormous, intangible and most unjust preponderance of interest
and influence can be neutralised, or the still more unjust preponderance
of mere numbers be counteracted?
Some thinkers predict that the coming ruler, the working man, will
change this rottenness to health; but it may safely be predicted that he
will do nothing of the kind. He will be at the least as selfish, as
bribable, and as vain, as the gentry who have preceded him; he will be
certainly coarser and clumsier in his tastes, habits, and pleasures, and
the narrowness of his intelligence will not restrain the extravagance of
his expenditure of moneys not his own, with which he will be able to
endow himself by legislation. If Socialism would, in reality, break up
the deadly monotony of modern society, who would not welcome it? But it
would do nothing of the kind. It would only substitute a deadlier, a
still triter monotony; whilst it would deprive us of the amount of
picturesqueness, stimulant, diversity and expectation which are now
derived from the inequalities and potentialities of fortune. The sole
things which now save us from absolute inanity are the various
possibilities of the unexpected and the unforeseen with which the
diversity of position and the see-saw of wealth now supply us. The whole
tendency of Socialism, from its first tentatives in the present trades
unions, is to iron down humanity into one dreary level, tedious and
featureless as the desert. It is not to its doctrines that we can look
for any increase of wit, of grace and of charm. Its triumph would be the
reign of universal ugliness, sameness and commonness. Mr Keir Hardie in
baggy yellow trousers, smoking a black pipe close to the tea-table of
the Speaker’s daughters, on the terrace of the House of Commons, is an
exact sample of the ‘graces and gladness’ which the democratic’
apotheosis would bestow on us.
It is not the cap and jacket of the Labour member, or the roar of the
two-legged wild beasts escorting him, which will open out an era of more
elegant pleasure, of more refined amusement, or give us a world more
gracious, picturesque and fair. Mob rule is rising everywhere in a muddy
ocean which will outspread into a muddy plain wherein all loveliness and
eminence will be alike submerged. But it is not yet wholly upon us.
There is still time for society, if it care to do so, to justify its own
existence ere its despoilers be upon it; and it can only be so justified
if it become something which money cannot purchase, and envy, though it
may destroy, cannot deride.