ARTHUR GETS ON IN THE WORLD.
There should never be more than six at a dinner, unless there are
fourteen. You can have your dinner either a parlor comedy or a
spectacular play: but you must choose which you will have. Mrs. Gower
was well aware of this; and hers consisted of a leading lady, a first
young lady, a _soubrette_, a virtuous hero, a heavy villain, and a
lover. With these ingredients, you may have a very pleasant dinner;
but you must be a sufficiently skilful observer of humanity to detect
the _rôle_. For people say that there are not such _rôles_ any more,
and that we are all indifferent and good-natured, and none of us heavy
villains.
Arthur was too inexperienced for this; for, like all young men, he also
supposed that all these characters were conventional fictions of the
stage. He did not believe in villains. Perhaps it would repay us to
formulate Arthur’s views, as those of a respectable young New Englander
of good education and bringing-up, with whose fortunes in life our book
is largely concerned. Roughly expressed, they might be put in canons,
much as follows:
I. The world is in the main desirous of realizing the greatest good of
the greatest number.
II. Unfortunate necessities--the primal curse of labor, or what
not--occupy the greater part of the time of the greater number with
sustaining life; so the leisure of the fortunate few is doubly pledged
to the discovery and attainment of the object before mentioned.
III. Money is a regrettable necessity; but its acquirement, even
from the selfish point of view, is but a means to an end. That end,
where personal, is the enjoyment of the pleasures of life--_i.e._,
literature, art, refined society, travel, and health. The larger end is
intelligent charity, or public work.
IV. Vice exists, like vermin, as a repulsive vulgarity.
V. Crime exists pathologically--_i.e._, it is either an abnormal
disease, or the consequence of a pitiable weakness.
VI. Honesty is the first virtue of the greater number; honor, which is
honesty with a flower added, is the peculiar virtue of a gentleman.
VII. Gentlemen are honorable and brave; ladies are like Shelley’s
heroines, or the ladies in the Idylls of the King.
VIII. The chiefest quality of humanity is love; and the object of all
human endeavor is to observe and avail itself of the love of that being
which is not humanity.
So much for his ethics; and, as we have said Arthur was a poet, it may
not come amiss to add an approximation of his theory of æsthetics. This
was, in brief:
IX. All beauty is the visible evidence of the love of God; nature is a
divine manifestation; and literature, art, and music are the language
in which humanity may reply. Thus, in particular, all highest poetry is
but this--the discovery of the love of God.
Such were his tenets, the standard of Arthur’s exalted moments, as
he supposed them then to be of others. In trying to live by them, he
knew that he was weak, as all men are. Of all the people whom he knew,
Gracie Holyoke alone seemed always to observe them.
So it may well be that Arthur did not, on that night, justly estimate
the worth of those about him. He had, simply, a very enjoyable dinner;
he was innocently pleased with the glitter of the glass, the sparkle of
the diamonds, the richness of the china, the beauty of the women, the
finish of their talk; it was a venial sin for him to like the food and
wines,--but there was perhaps one other ingredient in his pleasure, the
subtilest of all, which escaped him. Leaving this, for his account, let
us speak of the others.
And here we may save space and the wearied reader’s attention, for
they had no ethics and no æsthetics; and their philosophy of life was
simple. Probably their sensual sin was not so great as Arthur’s--for
terrapin and duck were a weariness to most of them--but in the _summum
bonum_ they all agreed. To be not as others are, and have those others
know it--such was their simple creed. Jimmy De Witt was on the whole
the most innocent; his being yearned for horses and yachts, even if
they were not all the fastest; and he was not a bad fellow, a great
friend of Lucie Gower himself, and so sitting _in loco conjugis_, for
the husband of the hostess was absent. To him came next Mrs. Malgam,
who was--but all the world, yea, even to the uttermost bounds thereof
where the society newspapers do permeate, knows all about Mrs. Malgam.
Upon De Witt’s other side, convenient, Miss Duval--“Pussie” Duval,
grand-daughter of Antoine of that ilk who had kept the little barber
shop down on Chambers Street; then Arthur, on Mrs. Gower’s right; and
on her left Caryl Wemyss again, a modern Boston Faust, son of the great
poet who was afterwards minister to Austria; his son, thus born to the
purple of diplomacy, had lived in Paris, London, and Vienna, executed
plays, poems, criticisms, music, and painting, and, at thirty-five, had
discovered the hollowness of things, having himself become perfect in
all of them. So he became a critic of civilization--and this is how he
was not as other men--for it was the era of the decadence, and he the
Cassandra who foresaw it. Mrs. Gower, our leading lady, made the sixth.
From being the lonely Cinderella of an unexplored fireside, Flossie had
grown to be one of the most famed and accomplished hostesses in all New
York. She had the tact of knowing what topics would touch the souls of
the men and move the women’s hearts, and of leading the conversation
up to these without apparent effort or insolent dictation. She could
make Strephon talk to Chloe, or Marguerite to Faust, without taking
the awkward pair by the elbows and knocking their heads together.
And all this sweetly, simply, while reserving the preferred _rôle_ to
herself, as a carver justly sets aside for his own use his favorite bit
of venison. Ordinarily, these six people--four of them, surely--would
have talked about other people and their possessions; but Mrs. Flossie
rightly fancied that Arthur, knowing little of the world, could only
talk about books, or at most, about the world in the abstract. Taking
up the talk where it was left at the opera, an early speech from Arthur
to the effect that he did not mean to go much into society gave her the
necessary opening.
“You must not do so,” said she. “Society is as important to a young man
as work. Is it not, Mr. Wemyss?” (One of the charms of this woman’s
cleverness was that indefinable quality of humor which consists in the
relish of incongruities; her reference to Wemyss for the uses of work,
for instance.)
“Society is sour grapes to those beyond its pale,” said Wemyss, “but
those who can value it press from it the wine of life.” (Wemyss gave a
little laugh, to indicate that he did not mean to be taken as a prig.)
“Seriously,” he added, “no person of wide intelligence can afford to
ignore the best society of a nation, whatever it be, for it represents
its essence and its tendency. It is the liquid glass of champagne left
in the frozen bottle, and has more flavor than all the rest, it is the
flower, which is at once the present’s culmination and the future’s
seed.”
“Oh, that is so true!” cried Pussie Duval. Miss Duval would have made
the same remark had Mr. Wemyss asserted that abuse of stimulants was
the secret of Hegel. The others stared rather blankly. Arthur had never
considered it quite so seriously; and to Mrs. Malgam and Jimmy De Witt,
interpreting it esoterically, society needed no more explanation than
the Ding an Sich.
“Then again,” said Wemyss, “did you ever go to a party of the people?
I don’t mean at Washington--there they get a little rubbed off--but at
home. Well, I went to one, once--some people who had lived for many
years in the house next to mine on Beacon Street--and I do assure you,
it was _triste à faire peur_; they thought you were flippant if you
even smiled, and took offence, like awkward boys and girls, at the
least informality. One longed for a Lovelace, _si ce n’était que pour
les chiffonner_. Now, in the world, one’s manners are simple, easy; you
have some liberty; people don’t take offence--_il n’y a jamais de mal
en bonne compagnie_. But the trouble with society in this country is,”
he continued, “that it has no meaning. Now it must have a meaning to be
interesting; it must mean either love or politics. In France, if not in
England, it has both. But here, all the meaning of it stops when one is
married.”
“Thank you,” said Flossie.
“Madame,” said Wemyss, “you are one of the three sirens, singing in
the twilight of the world. But in this dark night about you, society
exists only to make all young men get married. In the old time, it
had a more serious reason for being. In courts where there was a more
social element in politics, intrigues were always quasi-political;
parties were made at evening parties; and ministries were entered
from boudoirs; you met the Opposition in his salon, and embraced the
minister’s principles with--”
“Look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Gower, playfully.
--“when you paid a compliment to his wife. But here, society and
politics are worlds mutually exclusive; how would the Governor of the
State appear at a dinner-party? Politically, the best people are laid
on the shelf, like rare china. Society’s only recognized function is to
bring young people together; when brought together, they are supposed
to join hands and step aside; it is a marriage-brokerage board, and its
aim is merely matrimony.”
“What a social failure you must be, Mr. Wemyss,” said Flossie.
“In America,” retorted Wemyss. “But even a man who has not married has
some social rights. I like a society of men and women--not of Jacks and
Gills. But if I tell Mrs. Grundy her gown is becoming, likely as not
she’ll call for the police, in this country.”
“I think she’ll take a bit more than that without bolting,” laughed
Jimmy De Witt.
“The fact is,” said Wemyss, who felt that he was becoming epigrammatic,
“all worldly pleasures, from the original apple, rest on the taste of
the forbidden fruit. The joys of war, the delights of business, the
pleasures of gossip, the satisfaction of swearing,--they’re all the
fun of breaking some commandment. Voltaire never would have put pen
to paper but for the first; the pleasure of art is to worship graven
images; the spice of newspapers is the false witness that they bear
against your neighbor. And what becomes of fashionable life without
the tenth, or a faint and ever-present memory of the seventh? Now
all Americans covet their neighbor’s bank-account; but they are far
too practical to covet their neighbor’s wife. Positively, we are too
virtuous to be happy: for this Arcadian state of things makes society
necessarily dull. Like most of the devil’s institutions, it requires
considerable red pepper.”
Arthur stared at Wemyss, much astonished; but all three ladies seemed
to take it as very excellent fooling indeed. Even Jimmy looked as if he
didn’t wholly understand it, but knew it must be very good.
“But it’s the paradise of girls. It offers every opportunity to ardent
youth. It shows its prizes in a glamour of light and dress-making,
just as a Parisian shopkeeper puts gas-reflectors before his window.
Bright eyes and white shoulders are garnished in extraordinary silks
and satins; a blare of fiddles and trumpets fills up vacancies in their
intellect; and thus, with all their charms enhanced, they are dangled
before the masculine eye when his discernment has been previously
befuddled with champagne?”
“Positively,” laughed Mrs. Gower, “we must leave you to your cigars.
There’s no knowing what you’ll be saying next--and before an unmarried
lady, too. Pussie, my dear, go out first, and deliver Mr. Wemyss from
temptation.”
The three ladies rose, and the men drew back their chairs.
“You must really look out, Mr. Wemyss,” said Mrs. Malgam; “in one of
your lyric moments you’ll forget that some girl isn’t married, and be
engaged before you know it.”
Wemyss shuddered. “Ah, my dear lady, I wish I could forget that you
were married----”
“Hush, hush,” cried Mrs. Gower, rapping Wemyss’s knuckles with her fan,
“and _soyez sage_, when we are gone.”
But when left to themselves, Mr. Wemyss said little besides a word
or two about literature and art. His conversation might have been a
model to a governess fresh from boarding-school. Jimmy De Witt told a
few stories, and Arthur had great difficulty in talking at all. Mr.
Wemyss snubbed them both, as was his habit with intellectual inferiors;
and after a very short cigar, they all repaired to the drawing-room,
where little happened that Arthur saw; for, as all the company save
Mrs. Gower seemed to regard him as an interloping hobbledehoy, to
be tolerated only as a fantasy of Mrs. Gower’s, he shortly and not
over-gracefully took his leave.
He walked to the club, and smoked, somewhat nettled with things in
general, and full of much desire to punch Mr. Caryl Wemyss’s elegant
head. Others had had that mood before Arthur; but you see our hero is
by no means an exceptional personage. Being, however, the best we have
got, we feel bound to see him through. Still, no Loyola would have
chosen that dinner to be the time and place to reply to Wemyss with
the propositions we have stated for Arthur at the beginning of this
chapter; and the young idealist had wisely held his peace.