The Cult of Intensity
REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH
Scene—A drawing-room in "Passionate Brompton."
Fair Æsthetic (suddenly, and in deepest tones, to Smith, who has just been introduced to take her in to dinner): "Are you intense?"
The "Dilettante" satirized in a rather ponderous article—one of the series of "Modern Types"—in 1890 represents a later stage of pseudo-culture, in which a contempt for everything characteristically English is the leading trait. He warbles French chansonnettes, defies all the rules of English grammar and metre in his poetry, is much in request at charitable concerts in aristocratic drawing-rooms, affects a mincing delicacy in gait and manner, paints his face in middle age, talks habitually in an artistic jargon, and passes away in an odour of pastilles. The type existed and exists, but hardly deserved such detailed and elaborate portraiture. There is more interest in the verses on the over-cultured undergraduate in 1891—one of a series entitled "Men who have taken me in—to dinner," by a Dinner Belle:—
He stood, as if posed by a column,
Awaiting our hostess' advance;
Complacently pallid and solemn,
He deigned an Olympian glance.