In all great cities these changes succeed with fearful rapidity. Expensive tastes and extravagant habits are hourly ruining hundreds who pass off the scene where they shone, and are heard of no more. The ‘lion’ of the season—whose plate was a matter of royal curiosity, whose equipage gave the tone to the time, whose dinner invitations were regarded as the climax of fashionable distinction—awakes some morning to discover that an expenditure of four times a man’s income, continued for several years, may originate embarrassment in his affairs. He finds out that tailors can be uncivil, and coachmakers rude and—horror of horrors!—he sees within the precincts of his dressing-room the plebeian visage of a sherrifs officer, or the calculating countenance of a West-End auctioneer.
He who was booked for Ascot now hurries away to Antwerp. An ambiguous paragraph in an evening paper informs London that one among the ranks of extravagance has fallen; a notice of ‘public competition’ by the hand of George Robins comes next; a criticism, and generally a sharp one, on the taste of his furniture and the value of his pictures follows; the broad pages of the Morning Post become the winding-sheet of his memory, and the knock of the auctioneer’s hammer is his requiem! The ink is not dried on his passport ere he is forgotten. Fashionable circles have other occupations than regrets and condolences; so that the exile may be a proud man if he retain a single correspondent in that great world which yesterday found nothing better than to chronicle his doings.
When Sir Harry Wycherley then came back to London he was only remembered —nothing more. The great majority of his contemporaries had, like himself, passed off the boards during the interval; such of them as remained were either like vessels too crippled in action to seek safety in flight, or, adopting the philosophy of the devil when sick, had resolved on prudence when there was no more liking for dissipation. He was almost a stranger in his club; the very waiters at Mivart’s asked his name; while the last new peer’s son, just emerging into life, had never even heard of him before. So is it decreed—dynasties shall fall and others succeed them; Charles le Dix gives place to Louis-Philippe, and Nugee occupies the throne of Stultz.
Few things men bear worse than this oblivion in the very places where once their sway was absolute. It is very hard to believe that the world has grown wiser and better, more cultivated in taste and more correct in its judgments than when we knew it of old; and a man is very likely to tax with ingratitude those who, superseding him in the world’s favour, seem to be forgetful of claims which in reality they never knew of.
Sir Harry Wycherley was not long in England ere he felt these truths in all their bitterness, and saw that an absence of a few years teaches one’s friends to do without them so completely that they are absolutely unwilling to open a new want of acquaintance, as though it were an expensive luxury they had learned to dispense with. Besides, Wycherley was decidedly rococo in all his tastes and predilections. Men did not dine now where they used in his day—Doncaster was going out, Goodwood was coming in; people spoke of Grisi, not Pasta, Mario more than Rubini. Instead of the old absolute monarchy of fashion, where one dictated to all the rest, a new school sprung up, a species of democracy, who thought Long Wellesley and D’Orsay were unclean idols, and would not worship anything but themselves.
Now of all the marks of progress which distinguish men in the higher circles, there is none in these latter days at all comparable with the signs of—to give it a mild name—increased ‘sharpness,’ distinguishable amongst them. The traveller by the heavy Falmouth mail whisked along forty miles per hour in the Grand Junction, would see far less to astonish and amaze him than your shrewd man about town of some forty years back, could he be let down any evening among the youth at Tattersall’s, or introduced among the rising generation just graduating at Graham’s.
The spirit of the age is unquestionably to be ‘up and doing.’ A good book on the Oaks has a far higher preeminence, not to say profit, than one published in ‘the Row’; the ‘honours’ of the crown are scarcely on a par with those scored at whist; and to predict the first horse at Ascot would be a far higher step in the intellectual scale than to prophesy the appearance of a comet or an eclipse; the leader in the House can only divide public applause with the winner of the Léger, and even the versatile gyrations of Lord Brougham himself must yield to the more fascinating pirouettes of Fanny Ellsler. Young men leave Eton and Sandhurst now with more tact and worldly wit than their fathers had at forty, or than their grandfathers ever possessed.
Short as Sir Harry Wycherley’s absence had been, the march of mind had done much in all these respects. The babes and sucklings of fashion were more than his equals in craft and subtlety; none like them to ascertain what was wrong with the favourite, or why ‘the mare’ would not start; few could compete with them in those difficult walks of finance which consist in obtaining credit from coach-makers, and cash from Jews. In fact, to that generation who spent profusely to live luxuriously had succeeded a race who reversed the position, and lived extravagantly in order to have the means of spending. Wiser than their fathers, they substituted paper for cash payments, and saw no necessity to cry ‘stop’ while there was a stamp in England.
It was a sad thing for one who believed his education finished to become a schoolboy once more, but there was nothing else for it. Sir Harry had to begin at the bottom of the class; he was an apt scholar it is true, but before he had completed his studies he was ruined. High play and high interest, Jews and jockeys, dinners and danseuses, with large retinues of servants, will help a man considerably to get rid of his spare cash; and however he may—which in most cases he must—acquire some wisdom en route, his road is not less certain to lead to ruin. In two years from the time of his return, another paragraph and another auction proclaimed that ‘Wycherley was cleaned out,’ and that he had made his ‘positively last appearance’ in England.
The Continent was now to be his home for life. He had lost his ‘means,’ but he had learned ‘ways’ of living, and from pigeon he became rook.