Newspaper essayists assert that the young men of the day are to blame for this; that the young men like it; and the fair husband-anglers dress their flies in the colours most likely to attract a nibble. Whether this excuse be the true one I cannot pretend to judge; but it strikes me that the men about my own age who affect to be fast are a more languid race than the men from ten to twenty years older, whom they regard as slow. The habit of dram-drinking in the morning is a very new idea, an idea greatly in fashion at the moment. Adonis calls for a “pick-me-up” before he has strength enough to answer a billet-doux from Venus. Adonis has not the strength to get nobly drunk, but his delicate constitution requires stimulants, and he is always tippling.
The men of high birth or renown for social success belonging, my dear father, to your time, are still distinguished by an air of good breeding, by a style of conversation more or less polished and not without evidences of literary culture, from men of the same rank in my generation, who appear to pride themselves on respecting nobody and knowing nothing, not even grammar. Still we are assured that the world goes on steadily improving. That new idea is in full vigour.
Society in the concrete has become wonderfully conceited as to its own progressive excellences, and the individuals who form the concrete entertain the same complacent opinion of themselves. There are, of course, even in my brief and imperfect experience, many exceptions to what appear to me the prevalent characteristics of the rising generation in “society.” Of these exceptions I must content myself with naming the most remarkable. Place aux dames, the first I name is Cecilia Travers. She and her father are now in town, and I meet them frequently. I can conceive no civilized era in the world which a woman like Cecilia Travers would not grace and adorn, because she is essentially the type of woman as man likes to imagine woman; namely, on the fairest side of the womanly character. And I say “woman” rather than “girl,” because among “Girls of the Period” Cecilia Travers cannot be classed. You might call her damsel, virgin, maiden, but you could no more call her girl than you could call a well-born French demoiselle fille. She is handsome enough to please the eye of any man, however fastidious, but not that kind of beauty which dazzles all men too much to fascinate one man; for—speaking, thank Heaven, from mere theory—I apprehend that the love for woman has in it a strong sense of property; that one requires to individualize one’s possession as being wholly one’s own, and not a possession which all the public are invited to admire. I can readily understand how a rich man, who has what is called a show place, in which the splendid rooms and the stately gardens are open to all inspectors, so that he has no privacy in his own demesnes, runs away to a pretty cottage which he has all to himself, and of which he can say, “This is home; this is all mine.”
But there are some kinds of beauty which are eminently show places,—which the public think they have as much a right to admire as the owner has; and the show place itself would be dull and perhaps fall out of repair, if the public could be excluded from the sight of it.
The beauty of Cecilia Travers is not that of a show place. There is a feeling of safety in her. If Desdemona had been like her, Othello would not have been jealous. But then Cecilia would not have deceived her father; nor I think have told a blackamoor that she wished “Heaven had made her such a man.” Her mind harmonizes with her person: it is a companionable mind. Her talents are not showy, but, take them altogether, they form a pleasant whole: she has good sense enough in the practical affairs of life, and enough of that ineffable womanly gift called tact to counteract the effects of whimsical natures like mine, and yet enough sense of the humouristic views of life not to take too literally all that a whimsical man like myself may say. As to temper, one never knows what a woman’s temper is—till one puts her out of it. But I imagine hers, in its normal state, to be serene, and disposed to be cheerful. Now, my dear father, if you were not one of the cleverest of men you would infer from this eulogistic mention of Cecilia Travers that I was in love with her. But you no doubt will detect the truth that a man in love with a woman does not weigh her merits with so steady a hand as that which guides this steel pen. I am not in love with Cecilia Travers. I wish I were. When Lady Glenalvon, who remains wonderfully kind to me, says, day after day, “Cecilia Travers would make you a perfect wife,” I have no answer to give; but I don’t feel the least inclined to ask Cecilia Travers if she would waste her perfection on one who so coldly concedes it.
I find that she persisted in rejecting the man whom her father wished her to marry, and that he has consoled himself by marrying somebody else. No doubt other suitors as worthy will soon present themselves.
Oh, dearest of all my friends,—sole friend whom I regard as a confidant,—shall I ever be in love? and if not, why not? Sometimes I feel as if, with love as with ambition, it is because I have some impossible ideal in each, that I must always remain indifferent to the sort of love and the sort of ambition which are within my reach. I have an idea that if I did love, I should love as intensely as Romeo, and that thought inspires me with vague forebodings of terror; and if I did find an object to arouse my ambition, I could be as earnest in its pursuit as—whom shall I name?—Caesar or Cato? I like Cato’s ambition the better of the two. But people nowadays call ambition an impracticable crotchet, if it be invested on the losing side. Cato would have saved Rome from the mob and the dictator; but Rome could not be saved, and Cato falls on his own sword. Had we a Cato now, the verdict at a coroner’s inquest would be, “suicide while in a state of unsound mind;” and the verdict would have been proved by his senseless resistance to a mob and a dictator! Talking of ambition, I come to the other exception to the youth of the day; I have named a demoiselle, I now name a damoiseau. Imagine a man of about five-and-twenty, and who is morally about fifty years older than a healthy man of sixty,—imagine him with the brain of age and the flower of youth; with a heart absorbed into the brain, and giving warm blood to frigid ideas: a man who sneers at everything I call lofty, yet would do nothing that he thinks mean; to whom vice and virtue are as indifferent as they were to the Aesthetics of Goethe; who would never jeopardize his career as a practical reasoner by an imprudent virtue, and never sully his reputation by a degrading vice. Imagine this man with an intellect keen, strong, ready, unscrupulous, dauntless,—all cleverness and no genius. Imagine this man, and then do not be astonished when I tell you he is a Chillingly.
The Chillingly race culminates in him, and becomes Chillinglyest. In fact, it seems to me that we live in a day precisely suited to the Chillingly idiosyncrasies. During the ten centuries or more that our race has held local habitation and a name, it has been as airy nothings. Its representatives lived in hot-blooded times, and were compelled to skulk in still water with their emblematic daces. But the times now, my dear father, are so cold-blooded that you can’t be too cold-blooded to prosper. What could Chillingly Mivers have been in an age when people cared twopence-halfpenny about their religious creeds, and their political parties deemed their cause was sacred and their leaders were heroes? Chillingly Mivers would not have found five subscribers to “The Londoner.” But now “The Londoner” is the favourite organ of the intellectual public; it sneers away all the foundations of the social system, without an attempt at reconstruction; and every new journal set up, if it keep its head above water, models itself on “The Londoner.” Chillingly Mivers is a great man, and the most potent writer of the age, though nobody knows what he has written. Chillingly Gordon is a still more notable instance of the rise of the Chillingly worth in the modern market.
There is a general impression in the most authoritative circles that Chillingly Gordon will have high rank in the van of the coming men. His confidence in himself is so thorough that it infects all with whom he comes into contact,—myself included.
He said to me the other day, with a sang-froid worthy of the iciest Chillingly, “I mean to be Prime Minister of England: it is only a question of time.” Now, if Chillingly Gordon is to be Prime Minister, it will be because the increasing cold of our moral and social atmosphere will exactly suit the development of his talents.