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THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD
by
MRS. JOHN LANE
Author of "Kitwyk," "Brown's Retreat," etc.
London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: John Lane Company
MDCCCCV
Copyright, 1905,
by John Lane Company
The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
TO THE PUBLISHER
MY GENIAL AND
SUGGESTIVE CRITIC
_My Preface_
I was sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a _tête-à-tête_ with a
sheet of paper. A brisk fire burned on the hearth, and through the
beating of the rain against the little, curved Georgian windows I could
hear the monotonous roll of the sea at the foot of the narrow street,
and the tear and crunching of the pebbles down the shingle as the waves
receded.
I had been ordered to write a preface to explain the liberty I had taken
in making miscellaneous observations about two great nations, and then
putting a climax to my effrontery by having them printed. So here I was
trying, with the aid of a lead-pencil and a sheet of paper, to construct
a preface, and that without the ghost of an idea how to begin. Nor was
the dim electric light illuminating; nor, in the narrow street, the
nasal invocation of an aged man with a green shade over his eyes, arm
in arm with an aged woman keenly alive to pennies, somewhere out of
whose interiors there emanated a song to the words, "Glowry, glowry,
hallaluh!"
In fact, all the ideas that did occur to me were miles away from a
preface. It was maddening! I even demanded that the ocean should stop
making such a horrid noise, if only for five minutes. And that set me
idly to thinking what would happen to the world if the tides should
really be struck motionless even for that short space of time. The idea
is so out of my line that it is quite at the service of any distressed
romancer, dashed with science, who, also, may be nibbling his pencil.
I sat steeped in that profound melancholy familiar to authors who are
required to say something and who have nothing to say. Finally, in a
despair which is familiar to such as have seen the first act of _Faust_,
I invoked that Supernatural Power who comes with a red light and bestows
inspiration.
"If you'll only help me to begin," I cried, "I'll do the rest!" For I
realised in what active demand his services must be.
I didn't believe anything would happen. Nothing ever does except in the
first act of _Faust_, and I must really take this opportunity to beg
Faust not to unbutton his old age so obviously. Still, that again has
nothing to do with my preface!
I reclined on a red plush couch before the fire and thought gloomily of
Faust's buttons, and how the supernatural never comes to one's aid these
material days, when my eyes, following the elegant outlines of the
couch, strayed to a red plush chair at its foot, strangely and
supernaturally out of place. And how can I describe my amazement and
terror when I saw on that red plush chair a big black cat, with his tail
neatly curled about his toes! A strange black cat where no cat had ever
been seen before! He stared at me, and I stared at him. Was he the Rapid
Reply of that Supernatural Power I had so rashly invoked? At the mere
thought I turned cold.
"Are you a message 'from the night's Plutonian shore'?" I said,
trembling, "or do you belong to the landlady?"
His reply was merely to blink, and indeed he was so black and the
background was so black that but for his blink I shouldn't have known he
was there.
"If," I murmured, "he recognises quotations from _The Raven_, it will be
a sign that he is going to stay forever." Whereupon I declaimed all the
shivery bits of that immortal poem, which I had received as a Christmas
present.
He was so far from being agitated that before I had finished he had
settled down in a cosy heap, with his fore-paws tucked under his black
shirt front, and was fast asleep, delivering himself of the emotional
purr of a tea kettle in full operation. For a moment I was appalled. Was
this new and stodgy edition of _The Raven_ going to stay forever?
"'Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore,'" I
urged, but all he did was to open one lazy eye, and wink. For a moment I
was frozen with horror. Was I doomed to live forever in the society of a
strange black cat, of possibly supernatural antecedents?
"'Take thy form from off my door,'" I was about to address him, but
paused, for, strictly speaking, he was not on my door. And just as I
was quite faint with apprehension, common-sense, which does not usually
come to the aid of ladies in distress, came to mine. Like a flash it
came to me that even if he stayed forever, _I_ needn't. I had only taken
the lodgings by the week. He was foiled.
With a new sense of security I again studied him, and I observed a
subtle change. He was evidently a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of cat. I
became conscious of a complex personality. Though to the careless
observer he might appear to be only a chubby cat, full of purr, to me he
was rapidly developing into something more; in fact, mind was, as usual,
triumphing over matter, and presto! before I knew what he was about, he
had changed into an idea.
"To call you only a cat!" I cried in fervent gratitude. "Only a cat,
indeed! You are much more than a cat--you are a miracle! You are a
preface!" And so, indeed, he was.
Like one inspired I thought of his first illustrious ancestor, on four
legs, the one who had once so heroically looked at a king, with the
result that not only did he gain a perpetual permission for his race,
but he has passed into an immortal proverb. That was not his only
glorious deed, however, for it was he who first encouraged the Modest.
If it had not been for that historic cat, what would have become of
them! When the Modest want to say something, no matter how modestly, and
get frightfully snubbed, don't they always declare that "A cat may look
at a king"? Really, that illustrious cat has never had his due! Besides
heaps of other things, is he not the original type of the first true
Republican? I would like to know what the world would have done if he
hadn't looked at the king? Why, it was the first great Declaration of
Independence.
Besides, don't we owe to him, though hitherto unacknowledged, those
underlying principles of that other glorious Declaration of
Independence, the happy result of which seems to be that tea is so
awfully dear in America?
No, one doesn't hold with a cat's laughing at a king. No cat should
laugh at a king, for that leads to anarchy and impoliteness and things
going off. It is the cat who looks civilly at kings who has come to
stay, along with republics and free thought. But possibly that is the
one little drawback--thought is so dreadfully free! It used to be rather
select to think, but now everybody thinks, and kings and other important
things are not nearly as sacred as they used to be, and even the Modest
get a chance. I suppose it is the spirit of the Age.
I had got so far and had to nibble again at my pencil for further
inspiration, when the door opened and my landlady appeared. She is a
worthy woman, and she holds her head on one side like an elderly
canary-bird.
She spoke with a remnant of breath.
"If you please, ma'am, we have lost our Alonzo the Brave."
"You will probably," I replied with great presence of mind, considering
that I had no idea what she was talking about, "find him with the fair
Imogene."
Here my landlady, with her eyes penetrating the corners, gave a cry of
rapture, "There he is! Glory be!" And she pounced on the black and
purring stranger, who rose and stretched his back to a mountainous
height and his jaws to a pink cavern.
"This is our Alonzo the Brave," and she pressed his rebellious head
against the pins on her ample bosom.
"Oh, indeed," I said politely; "and though he is your Alonzo the Brave,
I hope you won't mind his being my preface, will you? And may I ask what
does he like best in the world besides Imogene?"
Alonzo the Brave had partly wriggled out of her ardent embrace, so that
he now hung suspended by his elastic body, while his legs dangled at
amazing length.
"Me," and my landlady simpered.
"I mean in the eating line," I explained.
Catnip, said his biographer, was his favourite weakness.
"Then get him a pennyworth of catnip and put it on my bill," I said
benevolently. For I thought as she carried him off struggling, even a
poor preface is cheap at a penny, and without Alonzo the Brave there
would have been no preface, and without his heroic ancestor the Modest
would never have had a chance!
I do hope this explains the following pages. I have not, like Alonzo's
ancestor, strictly confined my observations to kings. I have, indeed,
ventured to look at all sorts of things, many of them very sublime, and
solemn and important, and some less so; and, as the following pages will
prove, I have availed myself freely of the privilege of the Modest.
If the two greatest nations of the world have served me as "copy," it is
because they are very near and dear, and the Modest, like more
celebrated writers, have a way of using their nearest and dearest as
"copy," especially their dearest.
In conclusion, I trust I have adequately explained, by help of Alonzo
the Brave, that it is the privilege of the Modest to make observations
about everything--whether anyone will ever read them, why--that's
another matter.
A. E. L.
KEMPTOWN, January, 1906.
_Contents_
_Page_
The Champagne Standard 1
American Wives and English Housekeeping 40
Kitchen Comedies 75
Entertaining 104
Temporary Power 130
The Extravagant Economy of Women 153
A Modern Tendency 171
A Plea for Women Architects 181
The Electric Age 188
Gunpowder or Toothpowder 196
The Pleasure of Patriotism 211
Romance and Eyeglasses 220
The Plague of Music 230
A Domestic Danger 245
A Study of Frivolity 259
On Taking Oneself Seriously 271
Soft-Soap 290
_The Champagne Standard_
The other evening at a charming dinner party in London, and in that
intimate time which is just before the men return to the drawing room, I
found myself tête-à-tête with my genial hostess. She leaned forward and
said with a touch of anxiety in her pretty eyes, "Confess that I am
heroic?"
"Why?" I asked, somewhat surprised.
"To give a dinner party without champagne."
It was only then that I realised that we had had excellent claret and
hock instead of that fatal wine which represents, as really nothing else
does, the cheap pretence which is so humorously characteristic of Modern
Society.
"You see," she said with a deep sigh, "I have a conscience, and I try to
reconcile a modest purse and the hospitality people expect from me, and
that is being very heroic these days, and it does so disagree with me to
be heroic! Besides, people don't appreciate your heroism, they only
think you are mean!"
I realised at once the truth and absurdity of what she said. It does
require tremendous heroism to have the courage of a small income and to
be hospitable within your means, for by force of bad example hospitality
grows dearer year by year. The increasing extravagance of life is all
owing to those millionaires, and imitation millionaires, whose example
is a curse and a menace. They set the pace, and the whole world tears
after. Because solely of their wealth, or supposed wealth, they are
accepted everywhere, and it is they who have broken down the once
impassable barriers between the English classes, with the result that
the evil which before might have been confined to the highest, now that
extravagant imitation is universal, permeates all ranks even to the
lowest.
The old aristocracy is giving place to the new millionaires, and it
gladly bestows on them its friendship in exchange for the privilege of
consorting with untold wealth and possible hints on how to make it. The
dignity that hedges about royalty is indeed a thing of the past, since a
bubble king of finance is said to have been too busy to vouchsafe an
audience to an emperor.
There is nothing in the modern world so absolutely real and convincing
and universal as its pretence. It has set itself a standard of aims and
of living which can best be described as the Champagne Standard.
To live up to the champagne standard you have to put your best foot
foremost, and that foot is usually a woman's. It is the women who are
the arbiters of the essentially unimportant in life, the neglect of
which is a crime. It is the women who have set the champagne standard. A
man who lays a great stress on the importance of trivialities has either
a worldly woman behind him, or he has a decided feminine streak in his
character.
Yes, it is the champagne standard; for nothing else so accurately
describes the insincere, pretentious, and frothy striving after one's
little private unattainables. It is aspiration turned sour. Aspirations,
real and true, keep the world progressive, make of men great men and of
women great women; but it is the minor aspirations after what we have
not got, what the accident of circumstances prevents us from having,
which make of life a weariness and a profound disappointment. Not the
tragedies of life make us bitter, but the pin-pricks.
In America, for instance, one does not need to be so very old to be
aware of the amazing changes in the ways of living, the result of an
unbalanced increase of wealth which has brought with it the imported
complexity of older and more aristocratic countries. It is the older
civilisation's retaliation against those blustering new millions that
have done her such incalculable harm. Indeed, it would have been well
for the great republic had she put an absolutely prohibitive tariff on
the fatal importation. The republican simplicity of our fathers is
slowly vanishing in the blind, mad struggle of modern life--in a
standard of living that is based on folly. It is easier to imitate the
old-world luxury than the old-world cultivation which mellows down the
crudeness of wealth and makes it an accessory and not the principal.
Unfortunately we judge a nation by those of its people who are most in
evidence, and do it the injustice of over-looking the best and finest
types among its wealthiest class: men and women who are the first to
regret and disown what is false and unworthy in their social life. We
assume that the blatant, self-advertising _nouveau riche_, with whom
wealth is the standard of success and virtue, is the national American
type, instead of the worst of many types, whose bad example is as well
recognised as a peril to character in America as in other countries.
Wealth in all nations covers a multitude of sins, but in America, to
judge from recent developments, it would seem to cover crimes. Is not
America now passing through a gigantic struggle, the result of the
hideous modern fight for wealth, in which the common man goes under,
while the reckless speculators who juggled with his hard-earned savings
use these same savings to fight justice to the bitter end? Possibly in
no other enlightened country in the world could such titanic frauds,
with such incalculably far-reaching effects, be so successfully
attempted, and that by a handful of men who had in their keeping the
hopes of countless unsuspecting people who trusted to their honesty and
uprightness.
The race for wealth in America has become a madness--a disease. It is
not a love of wealth for what it will bring into life, of beauty and
goodness, but a love of millions pure and simple. Who has not seen the
effect of millions on the average human character? Who has not seen men
grow hard and rapacious in proportion as their millions accumulated? Who
has not seen the tendency to judge of deeds and virtue by the same false
standard? A shady transaction performed by a millionaire is condoned
because he is a millionaire and for no other reason. Without millions he
would be shunned, but with them he is regarded with the eyes of a most
benevolent charity. It is high time indeed that a prophet should arise
and preach the simple life, but let him not preach it from below
upwards. He must preach it to the kings of the world and the
billionaires and magnates, and above all to the lady magnates; and let
him be sure not to forget the lady magnates, for they are of the
supremest importance and set the fashion. Let him turn them from their
complicated ways. Now the ways of magnates and all who belong to them
are very instructive. The well-authenticated story goes that at a dinner
party the other night at a magnate's,--to describe his indescribable
importance it is sufficient to call a man a magnate--after the ladies
returned to the drawing-room, the hostess, her broad expanse tinkling
and glittering with diamonds, leaned back in a great tufted chair--just
like a throne _en déshabille_--and shivered slightly. A footman went in
search of the lady's maid.
"Françoise," said the magnate's lady with languid magnificence, "I feel
chilly; bring me another diamond necklace."
Yes, let the prophet first convert the magnate and the magnate's "lady"
to a simpler life, then the simple life will undoubtedly become the
fashion, for the small fry will follow soon enough. Are we not all like
sheep? And what is the use of arguing with sheep who are leaping after
the bellwether?
There is one safeguard for the American republic, and that is, in
default of any other description, its ice-water-drinking class. In its
ice-water-drinking class lies its safety, for that represents the
backbone of the republic. It represents a class which, in spite of the
sanitary drawbacks of ice, is a national asset. It seems curious to
boast of the people who drink ice-water, and yet they represent American
life, simple, sincere, and untouched by the sophistries of the champagne
standard, and of a social ambition imported from abroad; decently well
off people, but not so well off but that the only heritage of their sons
will be a practical education. Already we are reaping the curse of
inherited wealth in America, where, unlike England, it has no duties to
keep the balance. The English aristocrat has inherited political duties
and responsibilities towards his country which, as a rule, he
faithfully performs, and which make of him a hard-working man.
Unfortunately it is the fashion for the rich American, in his race for
wealth and pleasure, or out of sheer indolence, to ignore politics and
all that is of vital importance in national life. And until the best
elements of the nation take a practical interest in the government of
their country and in the administration of its great institutions, the
nation cannot reach its highest development. Just now, unhappily, we
have a warning example of what happens in America to the second
generation that inherits instead of makes incalculable wealth. The
District Attorney of New York, in a case which has shaken the foundation
of all commercial rectitude, is quoted as saying of the still young man
whom the accident of inheritance placed in a position of despotic power
over millions of money and millions of modest hopes: "He is an excellent
type of the second generation." It is an epigram which should be a
warning, as the cause is a menace to American business methods. For did
not Emerson say, studying American ways more than a generation ago when
American life was simpler: "It takes three generations from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves." But in that warning there is hope, for
in the scattering of wealth lies America's chance of salvation. Plain
living and high thinking once characterised what was best in American
life, and the men and women whose thoughts were high and whose living
plain were mostly from that simple ice-water-drinking class that has
produced much of the nobility and patriotism of America. That ice-water
has helped to encourage dyspepsia, granted; but even a great virtue can
have its defects.
How different was the America of our childhood! One remembers the
time when, if the honoured guest was not invited to quench his thirst
with ice-water at the hospitable board, he was, as a great treat,
furnished with cider. Claret was the drink of those adventurous souls
who had traditions and had been abroad. There was no champagne
standard--champagne only graced the table on solemn, state occasions.
But in these rapid days the hospitable people who would once have
offered you a serious glass of claret now give you champagne. And
because Smith, who can afford it, gives you good champagne, Jones, who
cannot afford it, gives you bad champagne. But the bad and the good
champagne are both tied up in white cloths, as if they had the
toothache, so how awfully lucky it is that when the label is fifth-rate,
Mrs. Jones, trusting in the shrouded shape, can offer bad champagne with
ignorant satisfaction.
It is interesting to study the evolution of Jones. There was Jones's
father; he didn't pretend. He lived in a modest house and kept one
servant and had a fat bank account. Old Mrs. Jones, a charming woman
with the manners of a duchess, helped in the housework. Old Jones dined
all the days of his life at one o'clock, and had a "meat-tea" at six. At
ten every night he ate an apple, and then he went to bed at ten-thirty.
He left a handsome fortune to his children, who shared alike, which made
Jones, Jr., only comfortably off. Now young Jones and his wife began by
following in the footsteps of their parents, but Jones made money in
business, and the result was that Mrs. Jones had aspirations.
Aspirations are always a feminine attribute. So Jones bought a
fashionable house, and instead of one servant Mrs. Jones keeps four;
instead of a joint and pie, American pie, for which his simple appetite
longs, Jones has a six-course dinner at eight which gives him dyspepsia.
There is not the ghost of a doubt that Mrs. Jones is too afraid of the
servants to have a plain dinner. And it is also quite certain that she
goes to a fashionable church for a social impetus rather than divine
uplifting, and that she sends her only child, Petra Jones, to a
fashionable kindergarten so that the unfortunate child, who is at an age
when she ought to be making mud pies, shall be early launched into
fashionable friendships. Indeed, one day, in a burst of confidence, Mrs.
Jones described how Petra had been snubbed. It seems that the Jones's
child met another small school-fellow in the park in custody of the last
thing in French nurses. Being only six and still unsophisticated in the
ways of fashion, she rushed up to the young patrician and suggested
their playing together.
"No, I can't play with you," the young patrician sniffed--"for my ma
don't call on your ma."
Why is it that the pin-pricks of life are so much harder to bear than
its tragedies? Mrs. Jones mourned over this snub to the pride of Jones,
but she has no leisure to observe that Jones, her husband, is meanwhile
growing old and hollow-eyed with care and business worries and the
expense of aspiring. O champagne standard! O foolish Mrs. Jones!
As long as we can be snubbed and suffer what is the use of telling us
that we are born free and equal? The only liberty we have is to breathe,
and our equality consists in that, plebeian and patrician alike, we are
permitted to take in as much air as our infant lungs can accommodate.
After that our equality ceases.
When Mrs. Jones goes to the expense of giving a dinner party, does she
only invite her nearest and dearest, who are acquainted with the extent
of Jones's purse? Not a bit of it. She invites most of her enemies and
some strangers. There really should be a limit to the attention one
bestows on the stranger within his gates.
There was dear old Mrs. Carter Patterson in the days of my youth. She
was a funny old woman with a nose like a beak, a rusty Chantilly lace
veil, and a black front. She stopped my mother in the street and
explained that she was in a tearing hurry as she was about to call on
Mrs. Mangles.
"Why, I thought," and my simple mother hesitated, "I thought you said
you hated her."
"So I do, my dear, so I do, but I always make a point of calling on my
enemies, it's no use calling on one's friends."
Who has not studied the increasing difficulty of that surgical operation
called the launching of a young girl into modern society. Every year it
grows more and more difficult--society seems to form a kind of trust to
keep out the young girl, at least to judge from the extreme difficulty
of getting her in; and after she is in, the bitterness of it, and
vexation of spirit, only the young girl knows. The operation is
different in different countries, though one has heard of the agonies
endured in England during the process. In America the ceremony is as
expensive as a wedding. Because one girl has had a huge coming-out
reception, that shakes her pa's cheque book to its centre, why the other
girl must have a still bigger one.
I have been a witness to the coming out of Maria's only child Nancy. The
education of Nancy was not so much to teach her anything, as to give her
the best opportunity of making fashionable acquaintances. It was my
privilege to study her mother's heroic efforts to get Nancy into a
fashionable dancing-school, the entrance to which gave the fortunate one
that supreme distinction which nothing else could. Twice "mother"
failed, and she wept in my presence in sheer weariness of soul, but the
third time Nancy got in--not triumphantly, but she slipped in by some
oversight of a fashionable matron whose duty it was to keep out
ineligible little children, and "mother" was happy, though the little
"400" boys in the round dances did neglect Nancy, who looked shyly and
wistfully about, a small melancholy wall-flower, with her eyes swimming
with tears, as the little boys wisely footed it with all the most
eligible of the "400" little girls. It is very instructive to see how
early the sense of worthy worldly wisdom develops itself!
But Nancy had passed through all these stages of social martyrdom, and
had comfortably hardened. Talk of the Spartan boy with the fox nibbling
at his vitals! There are worse things than having a fox nibble at your
vitals--Nancy knew.
When I met "mother" the morning of the coming-out of Nancy, she was
nearly in a condition of nervous prostration. The house was in the
clutches of florists and caterers, and father had fled to his office
with the strict injunction not to appear until late in the afternoon.
The awful problems were two: Would Nancy get as many bouquets as a rival
"bud"--the technical name for a debutante--who had reached the acme of
social distinction with two hundred and thirty-five, and would enough
people come to make a show?
"I shall die if she doesn't get as many bouquets as that Bell girl,"
"mother" cried in an ecstasy of nervous anguish, "but she has only got
two hundred and ten."
"It's as bad as getting married," I cried sympathetically.
"Quite," and Maria groaned; "and without any real result."
Between a confusion of carpet covering and potted plants I went upstairs
in search of the "bud."
"Only two hundred and ten bouquets," she cried in a tempest
of discontent, "and Betty Bell (the rival bud) is to have a
five-thousand-dollar ball and I am not! Mother says it isn't giving the
ball she'd mind, but it's people not coming. It's easy enough sending
out invitations, but the mean thing is, people accept and don't come.
That's the latest fashion," cried this bitter "bud." "Mother said she'd
be mortified to death to give a ball and have nobody but the waiters to
drink up the champagne. We're of just enough importance to have our
invitations accepted and thrown over if anything better turns up."
Such was her perfectly justifiable wail.
That afternoon at six I came again in my best clothes. A reception is
after all the simplest of social functions. It entails no obligations,
and is as democratic as an electric car. It is perhaps one of the few
functions in which even the noblest society may use its elbows, and as a
school for staring, the kind that sees through the amplest human body as
if it were mere air, nothing could be more useful and practical. It is
an interesting study to observe how the female lorgnette is on such
occasions so triumphant an impediment to sight.
Well, the whole street proclaimed the coming-out of Nancy. Carriages
lined the curbstones and an awning announced the festive nature of the
occasion. A band, crowded into a cubby-hole usually sacred to "father's"
overcoats and umbrellas, tried vainly to penetrate the talk--there was a
dense crush of human beings, and over all there was a mixed aroma of hot
air, flowers, and coffee. At the top of the "parlour," before a bank of
flowers, and burdened with bouquets, stood Nancy, all in expensive white
simplicity, her face radiant, and supported by an utterly exhausted
mother. Six young men who served as ushers, in collars tall enough for
a giraffe, brought up relays of friends to be introduced to mother and
"bud"--all just like a wedding, only the hero was wanting, and for
"mother's" sake one did wish the occasion had had a hero. Last year's
"buds" were brought up and examined this year's "bud," and there was a
great deal of chatter and hand-shaking, of the pump-handle kind, and a
pushing past each other of magnificent matrons in the latest things in
hats.
I was escorted up by one of the young giraffes, who solemnly introduced
me. A mighty different "bud" this from the one of the morning.
"I've got two hundred and forty bouquets," she whispered triumphantly;
and just then I caught mother's weary eye and knew as absolutely as one
knows anything in this uncertain world that "father" had sent in thirty.
Really, there is nothing so loving, so generous and so weak in this wide
world as an American father.
I was swept on by a crush of prosperous matrons accompanied by
expensively simple daughters--the matrons making obviously disparaging
mental criticisms about each other's daughters. For real simple,
unassuming jealousy there is nothing like rival mothers! So I was pushed
into the dining-room where the chief ornaments were four Gibson girls in
party frocks who, at a flower-laden centre-table, in the mellow light of
rose-shaded candles, dispensed glances, coffee, smiles, and tea, and
other frivolous afternoon refreshments. They had the best of it, these
beautiful young things at the table, especially when they could annex an
occasional man.
At half past seven the last visitor had gone, the function was over and
Nancy was "out," and "mother" sat drearily on a couch which had the
demoralised air of furniture horribly out of place. Everything drooped
except those stalwart American beauty roses, so costly, so splendid, so
hard, and so unromantic. O national flower of Americans!
I caught a glimpse of "father" vanishing down the front steps on his way
to the club. Nancy had flung herself into a big deep chair, and from
this point she looked coldly at "mother."
"The Perkinses did not come," was all she said, but "mother" gave a
start and groaned. The Perkinses represented the bloom of the occasion,
and the Perkinses had not come. There was nothing further to be
said--Maria did remark that it was as expensive as a wedding. "And to
think it isn't dinner time yet," she added drearily.
"At any rate Nancy is 'out,'" I said.
"But it was horribly expensive."
"Well, then, what did you have all this expense and bother for?"
"One has to do it," she cried in stony despair; "it's our standard--"
"Champagne standard," I interrupted.
"I don't know what you mean." Maria has all the virtues, but no sense of
humour.
"Then, for goodness' sake, why have her come out at all?"
Maria shuddered and looked cautiously about. Nancy had vanished.
"I'd die of mortification if she didn't marry. I won't have her turn on
me and say I hadn't given her a chance."
"But, Maria, you married your good and prosperous Samuel without coming
out. That didn't frighten him away! The highest standard your parents
ever aspired to was cider, and that only on state occasions."
"That is all changed," said my unhappy friend. "We have got to--"
"Pretend; that's just it, Maria! But why don't you give up pretending
and be happy? Did our parents ever pretend? They didn't. Think of your
father's simple home and his big bank account, and then think of your
Samuel with all his expenses and his cares."
But Maria was not to be convinced by argument--she was completely
crushed by the Perkinses not having come, and she declared obstinately
that her supreme duty in life was to get Nancy married--well if
possible, but at any rate married.
* * * * *
Maria is only a type, but she stands for aspirations in the wrong place,
and she is worn out with it. She has many virtues--that is, she has no
vices. Her whole soul is wrapped up in Nancy. Nancy is her religion. She
believes in Nancy, though she never took her Samuel seriously. She
married him in the simple period of her existence, and by the time she
began to aspire she had other ideals, and Samuel was more of a bore to
her than an ideal. Samuel did not take to her new aspirations as readily
as she. Men never do. Nancy constituted her romance; and yet she was an
impartial mother, for mothers can be divided in two classes, those who
are too partial and those who are impartial. Her mission in life was to
marry off Nancy.
"I'd rather she'd be married unhappily than not at all," she said to me
one day when I saw her again. "A real unhappiness is more healthy to
bear than an imaginary one."
Nancy herself furnished the particulars of her own private creed.
"I'd rather be married even if I were unhappy. It's my own unhappiness,
and I want my own whatever it is."
I suggested that there were other aims in life than getting married.
"Perhaps," she said, "but I haven't any. I've been brought up to that.
Most girls are, only they don't tell. I haven't to earn my living and I
haven't any talent for anything. If I don't marry, Ma'll be mortified
to death and she'll show it and that'll make me mad. Father won't care
and he won't notice that I'm growing older, though we girls don't grow
old prettily. We get pinched, and our little hands--for we have little
hands--grow clawy, and our hair gets thin at the temples, and we have
too much gold in our front teeth. Of course we are real pretty when we
are happy. But think of spending life seeing father go to sleep after
dinner, and mother playing patience--ugh! I've told mother if she
doesn't take me abroad I'll go slumming. There's no chance here. Half
the men are too busy making money to get married and the others are
afraid."
"So this is your education," I said later on to Maria; "I am glad you
have only one child."
"So am I," said Maria wearily, "for two would kill me."
Then in a burst of confidence: "She hangs fire. She isn't strikingly
plain nor strikingly beautiful, one's about as good as the other. She
has no accomplishments, and her golf is only so so. She isn't fast, nor
loud, nor smart. She is just an average girl and," Maria cried in
vexation, "there are such heaps of them. The luncheons and dinners and
theatre parties I have given without result! It is so tiresome for her
always to be bridesmaid. So we're going abroad. Father is willing to
live at the Club. Our men are too comfortable to get married. It's
simply wicked!"
"Maria," I said from my inmost conviction, "you have manoeuvred, with
the result that you have frightened off the eligibles--struggling
eligibles, and those are sometimes the best. But what struggler would
dare to ask a champagne-standard girl to keep his "flat"? It's flats
these days. He wouldn't think of dragging a white-tulled angel from a
palatial residence to a flat and a joint! You have frightened off the
young men. Marriage is getting out of fashion, and so are the comforts
of a home. It's all your fault, you champagne-standard mothers!"
Such was the coming-out of Nancy.
Now in my young days there was certainly no formal coming-out. All I
remember is that one day I still wore my hair in two pigtails, and the
next day old Mrs. Barnett Pendexter called. She was a fumbly old woman
with her fingers, and by accident--my sisters always declared--she left
two cards instead of one. The fatal result was that my pigtails were
pinned up and I was dragged out by my mother when she made calls, for
she declared, being socially learned, that now I was undoubtedly out. It
was also a little surgical operation in a minor way, but compared to
these days how simple and how inexpensive.
If one were asked which of the passions is the greatest force in modern
Society, one could safely reply "jealousy." Jealousy makes the world go
round. Don't we want what all our neighbours have, and don't we want it
with all our might and main? If we want it badly enough crime will not
stand in the way of getting it. Is it not at the bottom of most of our
defalcations, embezzlements, and commercial dishonesty in general? The
bank president who borrows the bank funds for his private use, the
cashier who falsifies the books, the little clerk who embezzles as the
result of expensive tastes,--are they not all the results of the
falsity and extravagance of modern life? Compared to the judicious
business man who keeps just within the border line that saves him from
the criminal law, and who lays traps for his credulous fellow-creatures
in the shape of alluring companies, the pickpocket, who runs some little
risk, is a blameless and worthy character. The champagne standard is the
whole world's measure, and even justice bows to it when it interprets
its laws for the rich and the poor. A company promoter, who in the
course of his career has wrecked thousands of lives, can, if he is only
rich enough, consort with the noblest and most virtuous of the land; but
of course he must be rich enough. Deny it who can? Be rich enough and
you are forgiven all crimes. O Champagne Standard!
Last year a certain deceased millionaire was tried in London for
gigantic frauds, and all the newspapers described how pleasantly he
greeted his friends when he entered the court and took his seat behind
his counsel. Positively not a bit proud. There was also a sympathetic
description of his clothes! The moral is, be a scoundrel on a
magnificent scale and you are still respected; indeed, you even become a
hero in some people's eyes. Justice being blindfolded cannot see, which
is a great convenience. Besides, are we not taught that God helps those
who help themselves?
In America there is no aristocracy yet, but God help it when the time
arrives, for it will be an aristocracy based on the most unworthy of
foundations--money. As for romantic traditions, well, it will take
several centuries to weave a halo of romance around a pork-packer, a
petroleum magnate, a railroad wrecker, or the company promoters who
flourish as the green bay tree. In centuries they may arrive at the
dignity of being ancestors--at present they are just what they are, and
are to be judged accordingly.
There is a growing mania in America these days for ancestors. It is a
luxury which can be indulged in only after people have accumulated
money. If you are grubbing for your daily bread it is a matter of
profound indifference to you where you came from, seeing what you have
reached is so unsatisfactory. But when your bank-book bursts with
deposits and your greed for money is partly satisfied, it is natural
that you should look out for new fields for your aspirations. So wealthy
Americans are just now very busy unearthing ancestors, in spite of not
becoming parents, and getting their genealogical tree planted, and
rummaging in the dust of the past for possible forefathers, and buying
family portraits. Yes, there is a great trade in family portraits--the
dingier the better. At any rate it keeps the pot boiling for many a
worthy painter, and that is something. Not that one has a rooted
aversion to ancestors--they are not to be despised if they leave you an
honourable name, a nice old estate, and cash and some brains, but there
are ancestors of whom the less said the better, and whose only legacy
would appear to be a slanting forehead, a weak chin, and a tendency to
unlimited viciousness.
The Herald's College could tell many a queer story of our sturdy
republicans in search of their forbears. An English woman told me that a
New York family had annexed a crusading forefather of her own, as well
as one who had had his head chopped off, and to whom they had no more
right than the grocer round the corner. She acknowledged that they were
a pretty bad lot (the ancestors), but she objected to have strangers
meddle with them. "You are funny republicans," she added genially,
"coming over here and grabbing our ancestors."
Now there is nothing so frank as a frank Englishwoman. "What is the use
of celebrated ancestors," she added, "if your whole present family are
as dull as ditch-water and bore you to distraction? I'd swap off my
crusading ancestor and my chopped-off-head one any time for a cousin
with brains. But mind you, I don't want your American millionaires
grabbing 'em without leave."
There are the Bedfords of New York. Susan and I went to school together.
Hitherto she has put on no airs with me, for I know the family
traditions, and that her excellent father began life as a cobbler. Then
he forsook cobbling and started a corset manufactory, which was a
distinguished success because he had invented a bone so like the
whale's that even that clever fish could not have proved it wasn't his;
and the deception made the old man's fortune. Thereupon he rose superior
and soared from corsets to real estate, and in real estate he made what
was briefly described as "mints." It was in the corset period that Susan
married Joe Bedford who was a drummer in the business, and though he
retired from corsets and went into real estate along with his
father-in-law, Susan was always conscious that he could never
accommodate himself to the grandeur of his new life. She had to do all
the aspiring, and it was she who passed a sponge over their previous
existence, and every time I saw them in New York she had added a new
lustre to their glory. The last time the door was opened to me by a
footman, brooded over, as it were, by the very noblest kind of English
butler. I saw at once that the whole family were afraid to death of him.
But in spite of her grandeur, Susan herself saw me downstairs to the
front door, in the American fashion, though conscious of the profound
and stony disapproval of the English butler. As I came opposite the hat
rack I caught sight of a satin banner covered with cabalistic characters
floating gently over Joe's modest bowler that swung from a peg.
"Our coat of arms," Susan explained by way of introduction. "Just come
home. It cost a great deal; everything costs so much. We have the same
arms as the Duke of Bedford. It is pleasant to have a duke in the
family."
"Since when?" I asked, and stared in astonishment.
"I found them in the dictionary six months ago. I had it done at
Tiffany's. It looks so stylish on the plates and the writing paper."
"Come in here, Susan," and I led her into her own parlour, for I did not
wish to lower her in the estimation of that noble being who was
preparing his mighty mind to show me out. "Listen to me; you and Joe
haven't any more to do with the Duke of Bedford than the cat's foot.
Besides, his name isn't Bedford but Russell. For goodness' sake don't
make such an idiot of yourself."
"I guess," and Susan was deeply offended, "I guess the young man at
Tiffany's knows more about it than you do. He engraves for the first
families, and he said it was all right."
It was quite recently, too, that I crossed from Boston with three gentle
female pilgrims in search of an ancestor. The youngest was nearly
seventy, and we were barely out of sight of that famous tail of land
called "Cape Cod" when they told me their simple story. They came from
Cape Cod and their homestead stood on a sandhill and faced the sea. A
long straggling street up a sand bank culminated in a meeting-house with
a steeple as sharp as a toothpick. They were innocent and graphic old
ladies and they had only two vivid interests in life; one was a
Devonshire ancestor supposed to have died three hundred years before,
and the other, two cats called respectively Priscilla and John Alden.
The ancestor was the one romance of their placid lives, and it became a
question of going to find him, now or never; so here they were. They had
turned the key in the lock of their Cape Cod homestead and bidden a
long farewell to Priscilla and John Alden, and as they described their
grief I saw their three pairs of benevolent eyes fill with tears.
"The sweetest cats that ever breathed," said the oldest, with a face
like a benediction.
"What did you do with them?" I asked after a sympathetic pause.
"We chloroformed them," said the dear old thing whose face was like a
benediction.
I offered up an involuntary smile to the manes of these deceased
martyrs, Priscilla and John Alden, and I am absolutely sure the ancestor
wasn't worth the sacrifice.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the champagne standard, like hotel
cooking, has no nationality. It is everywhere, and one studies it
according to one's experience, but it is undoubtedly the curse of an age
that only judges of success by material results. It is above everything
a menace to character.
Modern life is the apotheosis of trivialities, and perhaps there is
nothing more curious and melancholy than to observe their exaggerated
importance to the world in general. One asks what is the use of such
childish fretting to people confronted by tragic realities. What is the
use of snubbing any one as if we were immortal? The truth is, each, in
his own estimation, is immortal. Who thinks of dying? Why, if we
expected to die at once, we certainly would not snub any one, and, in
the face of so tragic a probability, we would not notice being snubbed.
And yet there is absolutely nothing so absolutely certain as death,
before which every pretence, every ignoble aspiration, every sordid
ambition, stands naked and futile and, in some other world possibly,
ashamed.
But one cannot help wondering what kind of a blissful place the world
would be without the champagne standard. How good and honest we should
be if we didn't pretend--how easy it would be to live! Are not most of
the trials of life, apart from its tragedies, its results? Most of our
harrowing anxieties usually have their rise in aiming at what is beyond
our reach. And yet what, in the name of common sense, what is it all
for? What is the use of pretending? What is the use of doing things
badly when it is so much easier not to do them at all?
Yes, indeed, the greatest heroism in these days is to have the courage
of one's income. It is possibly a little awkward at first, but what a
relief to be able to say simply, "I can't afford it," and not lose
caste! But Modern Society is ruled over by "Appearances." Appearances
are a kind of Juggernaut which requires our happiness and peace and
contentment as a daily sacrifice--but not the wise and honourable
appearances, but the little, mean, false ones, and those are the most
common.
One is inclined to think, however, that even the champagne standard may
yet find its Nemesis. For if the world goes on at its present rate all
its wealth will in time be swallowed up by the Trusts, and the Trusts
will in turn be swallowed up by the mighty maws of the few whom God, in
his righteous wrath, permits to plunder the earth, just as He once
permitted a deluge for the regeneration of the world. And the blessed
result will be that the whole wide world, being as poor as the
traditional church mouse, will come to its senses, and the first thing
that will happen will be the abolishing of the champagne standard. So
herein lies the world's salvation, to be saved it must be ruined; and
for the first time Trusts may be looked upon in the light of the
benevolent saviours of mankind. When we are all as poor as the most
plausible of them can make us, and that is saying a good deal, behold we
shall then finally cease to pretend.