THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY
Early Experiences of London Society--Society Thirty Years Ago
Relatively Small--Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish
in Small Societies Only
Comparing London society as it was when I first knew it with what it has
since become, I should say that its two most distinguishing features
were its then comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned
position. Its position was mainly founded on the hereditary possession
of land, its nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families
whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an
agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being
entertained for the few months called "the season." Certain
qualifications in the way of family being given, mere personal charm and
accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in
its ranks. Indeed, such qualifications were by no means always
necessary, as was shown in still earlier days by the cases of Moore and
Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in
London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted,
when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented
by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the form
of inherited land.
This was no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms
of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside
the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people
whose incomes exceeded L5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the
rich class of the country. The condition of things since then has in
this respect been reversed. During the sixty years succeeding the battle
of Waterloo business incomes exceeding L5,000 a year had increased
numerically in the proportion of one to eight, while since that time the
increase has been still more rapid. On the other hand, not only has the
number of the large agricultural landlords shown no increase whatever,
but since the year 1880 or thereabouts their aggregate rental has
suffered an actual decrease, having fallen in the approximate proportion
of seventy to fifty-two. This shrinkage in the fortunes of the old
landed families, except those who were owners of minerals or land near
towns, and the multiplication of families newly enriched by business,
were, when I first knew London, proceeding at a rate which had never
been known before. It was, however, slow in comparison with what it has
since become, and the old landed families, at the time to which I am now
alluding, still retained much of their old prestige and power, as is
shown by the fact that the leaders of both political parties were still
mainly drawn from the limited class in question. It is shown with even
greater clearness by facts more directly presenting themselves to the
eye of the ordinary observer.
One of these is the aspect which thirty years ago was presented by Hyde
Park during the season at certain hours of the day. Thirty years ago,
for an hour or two before luncheon and dinner, its aspect was that of a
garden party, for which, indeed, no invitations were necessary, but on
which as a fact few persons intruded who would have been visibly out of
place on the lawn of Marlborough House. To-day this ornamental
assemblage has altogether disappeared, and its place has been gradually
taken by a miscellaneous crowd without so much as a trace even of
spurious fashion left in it. Thirty years ago Piccadilly in June was a
vision of open carriages brilliant with flowerlike parasols,
high-stepping horses, and coachmen, many of whom still wore wigs. To-day
these features have been submerged by a flow of unending omnibuses which
crowds fight to enter or from which they struggle to eject themselves.
Fashionable hotels have succumbed to the same movement. Of such hotels
thirty years ago the most notable were commonly described as
"private"--a word which implied that no guests were received who were
not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials.
Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this
description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere
chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these
than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by
placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.
But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ
from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less
numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects
which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a
general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social
intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same
time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of
varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot
be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are
provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle
similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily
opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals
belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are
constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life
and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society
which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose
position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no
standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly
simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by
conscious effort or affectation.
The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London
when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in
the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than
that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who
vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names
had a ring of importance when printed in the _Morning Post_, society
was, even for men of conspicuous talent--such, for example, as Lord
Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward--a matter as serious as politics,
or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes
and Kenneth Howard it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon
party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland
asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord
Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a
judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of
to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth
mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar
occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ----'s. That is sure to be good, for
Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her
list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the
cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G----, denounced to a friend the
impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of
her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the
trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were
fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord
Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise
society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real
happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."
The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its
judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was
illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as
she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for
the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of
kindness she attached one strict condition--namely, that the blinds of
the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should
suspect that she--Lady A. herself--was guilty of remaining in London
when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher,
Lady E---- of T----, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on
the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to
form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost
identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, _Pelham_, is
administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially
careful," said Lady E---- to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some
are remarkable for their _chefs_, some for the importance of their
company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to
learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which it will be
enough for him to be merely seen; and, with very few exceptions"--this
was her concluding counsel--"you should never be seen at a ball in a
two-roomed house--a house, for example, like the houses in Eaton Place."
Another sort of social philosopher, in his own way equally typical, was
Hamilton Aide, who united to the life of society the cultivation of art,
and was equally serious in his combined devotion to both. He was a
musician, a poet, a singer of his own songs in a voice perfectly
modulated. He was also as a painter in water colors one of the most
distinguished amateurs of his time. His landscapes, indeed, and his
sketches of old houses and gardens, Scotch castles, and the seclusions
of Italian villas, were in themselves poems; and when he entertained the
world--a world very carefully chosen--the attention of his guests was
divided between his music and his great portfolios. His bachelor's
quarters provided him with an appropriate background. His writing table
was dominated by something resembling an altarpiece--namely, a large and
ingenious rack, on which was arranged a battalion of invitations to
balls and dinner parties; and his blotting book was flanked by two
delicate volumes, one being a _libro d'oro_ in the shape of a bulky
visiting list, the other being a list of his engagements from day to
day. He and his accomplishments were a finished work of art between
them. But in a larger world his development would have been no more
possible than the development of an orchid in the middle of a crowded
street.
And the same is the case with regard to society generally. There are
certain accomplishments which a small society tends to develop, and
which a larger society does not. Among these the art of conversation is
prominent, especially when it takes the form of wit, or becomes the
vehicle of certain kinds of humor. I may further illustrate this general
observation by mentioning a few individuals, of whom three at least are
still well known by name, not to society only, but also to the world at
large. These are Constance, Duchess of Westminster; Caroline, Duchess of
Montrose, and the Duchess of Somerset, who, as Lady Seymour, was the
heroine of the Eglinton Tournament. These ladies were all remarkable for
the peculiar magic of their voices and for a peculiar sense of humor
which their voices managed to indicate, and which gave its quality to
their general views of life. They none of them laughed audibly, but the
voice of each was a sort of laugh in solution, and this would produce a
sense of laughter in others, even though in the words of the speaker
herself there was no special felicity.
The Duchess of Montrose, by the mere tone in which she mentioned a
name, would often convey a whole criticism of the person named; and
though her topics and language were not infrequently of a kind which
caused austere censors to reprehend, and even to avoid, her, yet if such
censors found themselves by chance in her company, they would one and
all be listening to her before five minutes was over.
The Duchess of Somerset's voice had the same spell of ambushed laughter
in it, but she was a far greater mistress of the actual arts of
language, if "art" be a word appropriate to the exercise of natural
genius. I was asked by her daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, to help her
in compiling a volume of family memoirs, which would, so we hoped, have
comprised a number of the Duchess's letters; but most of these had to be
discarded as not suitable for publication, because of the numerous
sketches contained in them of various friends or connections, which were
drawn with a wit and precision worthy of Miss Austen herself in her
least merciful moments. One specimen, however, may be given without
compunction. She was describing a visit paid by her to a well-known
country house, and mentioned that among the company were a prominent
statesman and his wife, the former of whom was dear to caricaturists on
account of his superabundant figure. "Sir ---- and Lady ---- are here,"
she wrote. "She is expecting; but he shows it most."
Here are examples of conversational or descriptive art which, in a large
and mixed society, would, even if possible, be hardly so much as
perceptible. I may take as two other examples Sophy, Lady Roden, and
Lady Dorothy Nevill. Unlike Lady Dorothy, whose chronicled sayings have
made her a public character, Lady Roden was known only to a small circle
of intimates. She was a daughter of Byron's celebrated friend Mr.
Hobhouse, subsequently Lord Broughton, and had received something of a
really classical education under the semipaternal auspices of Thomas
Love Peacock. Hence her conversation had a certain natural crispness
which enabled her to indicate by touches, however light, any oddities of
demeanor or conduct on the part of friends or acquaintances to persons
whose standards were more or less like her own. There was a silly young
woman who, after several years of matrimony, was ambitious of pushing
her conquests beyond the matrimonial limits; and with this object in
view did her best to be visible driving about with a succession of
guiltlessly apathetic admirers. "Poor Mrs. P----," said Lady Roden. "She
takes far more trouble in attempting to ruin her reputation than most
women do to preserve it; but all her attempts are vain."
Lady Dorothy's charm in conversation was due to an adventurous
whimsicality, perfectly natural, which was absent from Lady Roden's. She
saw everything through a medium of unexpected analogies. She was one day
asked in my hearing whether she had enjoyed herself at a Marlborough
House garden party. "My dear," she said, "half of the people there I had
never seen before in my life, and of those whom I _had_ seen, I thought
that half had been safe in Kensal Green." On another occasion, having
been at a fancy ball--balls were a kind of entertainment which she very
rarely frequented--and having been asked by a friend for an account of
it, she replied: "By far away the most remarkable figure was ----. There
she was--I don't know what she called herself--Diana in front, and
George the Second behind."
But of the conversational art which flourishes in small societies only I
could find the best examples, not among women, but among the men of what
was then an expiring generation--men whose manners had been formed in a
society smaller still. Alfred Montgomery was a wit of this classical
type, and may be taken as representing others, all of whom, when I knew
them, were verging on old age. These men, though free from any trace of
pedantry, were never guilty of slang, unless slang was used
intentionally for the purpose of humorous emphasis. Their conversation,
if taken down verbatim, would have afforded perfect specimens of
polished yet easy English. A lady of great wealth (who has long since
been dead, but who shall nevertheless be nameless) had been for a time
under some sort of social cloud, many influential people having
virtuously refused to notice her. Toward the end of her life, however,
the most august of all possible influences had raised her to a position
of such fashionable brilliance that a great ball given by her had been
the chief event of a season. Lady Roden asked Alfred Montgomery some
question as to who had, and who had not, been there. "When a woman like
Mrs. ---- gives a ball of that kind, it is," he said, "an act of revenge
quite as much as an act of hospitality. She takes far more pleasure in
thinking of the people she has _not_ asked than in thinking of those she
has."
Certain other examples of conversational art occur to me which I
associate with a form of entertainment now a thing of the past. Of
London life as it had been long before I knew it, a notable feature,
constantly referred to in memoirs, had been the breakfast party. It had
before my time nearly, but had not quite, disappeared. It was so far
kept alive by Lord Houghton, at all events, that a breakfast at his
house in Bruton Street is one of my own early recollections. The repast
began at ten and lasted for half the morning. There must have been about
twenty guests. Two of them were "lions," whose hair was more remarkable
than their speech. The rest were men of some sort of social eminence,
who seemed to find the occasion not wholly congenial; and, in spite of
the efforts of the host, conversation had a tendency to languish till a
topic turned up which was then attracting public notice. This topic
roused one of the guests--a seasoned man of the world--from a mood of
apparent apathy into one of such humorous animation that soon the rest
of the company were holding their breaths to listen to him. The topic in
question was a volume of scandalous memoirs which had lately been
published by Rosina, wife of the first Lord Lytton, for the purpose of
attacking a husband from whom she had long been separated. The guest to
whom I am now alluding caught the attention of everybody by confessing
to an intimate acquaintance with the ways of this caustic lady, and
proceeded to illustrate them by a series of amusing anecdotes of which I
recollect the following:
Bulwer Lytton, as he then was, was candidate for one of the divisions of
Hertfordshire, and speeches were being delivered from the hustings by
supporters of local influence--among others by Lord Cowper. Lord Cowper
was still speaking when something appeared at his elbow in the likeness
of the candidate's wife. "Now, Billy Cowper," she said, "we've listened
to you long enough. Sit down, and let _me_ speak. You propose,
gentlemen, to send my husband to Parliament. I am here to tell you that
Parliament is not the proper place for him. His proper place," she said,
pointing to the ground, "is below; and when you have sent him there, he
will learn something of what he at present knows nothing. That something
is Justice."
On another occasion, speaking in more moderate tones, she observed to a
circle of acquaintances: "My husband is a man who has been born out of
his due time. He ought to have been born nineteen hundred years ago. Had
he been born then, he would have been Judas Iscariot. He would have
betrayed his Master; he would have taken the thirty pieces of silver;
but then he would not have hanged himself--far from it. He would have
sat down and written the Epistle to the Ephesians."
On another occasion she told the following story of him. He was, so she
said, in London, and she, having been left in the country, had written
to propose joining him. He had at once replied begging her not to do so,
but to leave him a little longer in the enjoyment of philosophic
solitude. "When I heard that"--so she confided to a friend--"I set off
for London instantly; and there I found him with Philosophic Solitude,
in white muslin, on his knee."
"Perhaps," added the narrator, "even less agreeable to the delinquent
would have been, had he heard it, her description of his physical
appearance. Alluding to the fact that his head was undoubtedly too large
for his body, she said, 'My husband has the head of a goat, and he has
the body of a grasshopper.'"
But of all the men who, in the way of conversational wit or otherwise,
figure in my memory as types of a now vanished generation, the most
remarkable still remains to be noticed. This was the second Duke of
Wellington. Even to those who knew him only by sight he was memorable,
on account of his astonishing likeness to the portraits or statues of
his father. He had not, or he had not chosen to cultivate, the talents
which mainly lead to distinction in public life, but by the small circle
of those who were intimate with him during his later days he was known
for a humor, a polished wit, and a shrewdness which made him, of all
possible companions, one of the most delightful. I knew him intimately
myself as far as my age permitted. I often stayed with him at
Strathfieldsaye, not only when he had parties, but also when, as
sometimes happened, we were together for a week alone. On these latter
occasions I had all the mornings to myself, and every afternoon I took
with him long walks, during which he poured forth his social or other
philosophies, or else told me stories of his father so pointed and
numerous that, had I written them down, I might then have compiled a
life of him which would form a very interesting supplement to those
which exist already. I never, in the course of these walks, experienced
a dull moment.
The only great entertainment at which I ever encountered him was a
dinner party of his own given at Apseley House. During one of such
visits which I paid him at Strathfieldsaye he told me that very soon he
would have to give a party in London in honor of the King of the
Belgians. The party was to be a large dinner, and he asked me to be one
of the company. The time arrived. The King of the Belgians for some
reason failed to come, but everything had been arranged in an
appropriate manner for his reception. As a spectacle the table was
noteworthy. It was covered with gold plate--a historic monument to the
great hero of Waterloo--which consisted of figures of soldiers, horses,
palm trees, camels, artillery, and other military objects symbolical of
his various campaigns; and gold plate at intervals all round the table
was supplemented by triumphal wreaths. The duke told me afterward that
all these decorations were due to his own forgetfulness. He had for
years been accustomed to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of
Waterloo by a banquet to certain officers who had been present at it,
and who still survived; but the number of these had already been so
reduced that he had determined to discontinue the celebration. In
fixing, however, a day for the dinner now in question, he had entirely
forgotten that the date ultimately chosen was none other than the day of
the great battle. His servants had concluded that, in honor of Belgian
royalty, he was giving one more repetition of the Waterloo banquets of
the past. Everything had been arranged accordingly; and I was thus
present at a function which will never take place again.
But it was not at such functions that his real character displayed
itself. This only came out in intercourse of a much more private kind,
as would happen at Strathfieldsaye when he entertained parties of not
more than ten people. When I was present on such occasions I was usually
the youngest--by far the youngest--member of the company. Of the rest I
may mention as examples Lady Dorothy Nevill, Alfred Montgomery, Sir
Hastings Doyle, Lord Calthorpe, Sir St. George Foley, Lady Chesterfield,
and Mr. Newtons, the courtly police magistrate, called by his friends
"The Beak." And here--to repeat in substance the observation which I
have made already--what always struck me was the far greater polish of
manner that prevailed among these my elders than any which was
cultivated among my own, the then rising, generation. In such an
atmosphere the Duke's special gifts were at home. He never strained
after effect. His words seemed to crystallize into wit or poignant humor
before he had time to reflect on what he was going to say. But these
qualities were perhaps seen at their best in tete-a-tete encounters or
correspondence. At all events, it is from such occurrences that
illustrations of them can be most readily drawn.
He had often spoken to me of his dislike of anything in the nature of
jobbery, and this was once brought out in a very characteristic way by a
passage at arms between himself and Lady St. Helier. Lady St. Helier had
written to him to ask him if, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, he would
make one of her friends a magistrate. The duke promptly replied that her
friend was an entire stranger to him, and that he never made
appointments of that kind as a favor to some third party. There the
matter rested for a week or two, at the end of which period she received
the following note from him:
DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.
You have treated me extremely ill. I have made inquiries about
your friend, and I find he is part-proprietor of--here he named
a certain place of amusement--which I learn is frequently used
as a place for assignations of a very reprehensible kind.
Lady St. Helier's immediate reply was this:
MY DEAR DUKE.
I have nothing more to say. You are acquainted with such
matters so much better than I am.
Not long afterward he met her on somebody's doorstep, and she, who was
taking her departure, greeted him with some slight frigidity. He merely
looked at her with a momentary twinkle in his eye, and said, "I think
you had me there." Some days later she received yet another letter from
him, which consisted of these words:
DEAR LADY ST. HELIER.
The deed is done. God forgive me.
A further encounter took place of something the same kind--the duke
himself told me of this--from which he emerged the victor. He had, he
said, received a letter from Lady Herbert of Lee, in which she begged
him to contribute L100 toward the total required for the restoration of
some Catholic church, and his answer had been as follows:
DEAR LADY HERBERT.
I shall be very happy to give you the sum you name, for a
purpose so excellent as yours. At the same time I may say that
I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at
Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by
sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money
need pass between us.
In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to
him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton.
When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had
begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental
column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to
the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and
intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work
farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present
day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the
credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to
the petitioners was, so he told me, this:
GENTLEMEN.
It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to
nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own
ingratitude.
Strathfieldsaye may have been in old days the scene of many political
incidents. The latest was one at which I myself was present. The heroine
of it was Miss Meresia Nevill, Lady Dorothy's daughter, who afterward
achieved renown as a luminary of the Primrose League. She was then in
her novitiate only, and the duke one morning whispered to her that he
would give her a lesson in oratory. I was asked to be present at it,
but otherwise it was to be strictly secret. Accordingly after breakfast
she, I, and the duke met by appointment in the library. The doors were
locked, and Miss Nevill, who had brought some memoranda with her
scribbled on a half-sheet of letter paper, was told by the duke to take
her stand on the hearth rug and give him a specimen of her powers by
declaiming what she proposed to say, he himself being seated on a sofa
watching her. "Now," he said, "begin." Bashfully consulting her notes,
and speaking with apologetic rapidity, Miss Nevill began to murmur, "My
lords, ladies and gentlemen." "No!" ejaculated the duke; "my dear young
lady, no! Mouth it out like this: "My lords--ladies--_and_--gentlemen."
Don't say it as if you were saying your prayers." In this humorous but
most admirable advice there was no great verbal brilliance; but his
tendency to verbal brilliance showed, on one occasion at all events, how
capable it was of translating itself into the highest form of literary
art. A favorite amusement of his was making translations from Horace.
Among the passages which had specially provoked this enterprise was one
the Latin of which is so terse and pungent that it has often been
pronounced untranslatable. It is the passage in which Horace describes
true happiness as that of the man who, looking back from to-morrow, is
able to say, "I was really alive all yesterday." Dryden's pithy version
of it is to the effect that the sole true happiness is that of the man:
Who, secure at eve, can say,
"To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day."
The duke's version was on a yet higher level than this, embodying in it
a concentrated pungency and a _curiosa felicitas_ which were quite in
the vein of Horace, but contain a thought not present in the original.
They were comprised in these few words:
Happy if only I enjoy
My rival's envy for a day.
It is true this specimen of the duke's wit in literature does not bear
directly on the question of wit in social conversation; and yet it may
lead the mind to questions which are very closely akin to it. The
felicity of the duke's translation has a very close resemblance to the
_curiosa felicitas_ of Pope--for instance, in his "Characters of Women"
and his celebrated satire on Addison. Nearly all Pope's satires are
addressed, if not to a small society, yet at all events to a small
public, and outside that limited body they would have neither vogue nor
meaning.