BRITISH PROPRIETY
Hawker: "Book o' the words, my Lady. Hortherized copy. The Dam o' Cameleers!"
Mrs. Jones (for the benefit of the bystanders): "Oh no, thank you. We've come to see the acting, we do not wish to understand the play!"
It is not a bad picture of Oxford preciosity in the early 'nineties—the age of the Yellow Book—and contains the first reference in Punch to the new educational gospel of self-realization, or "self-expression," as it is now called. The mention of early Chinese poetry was probably only a piece of "intelligent anticipation," for its vogue only began yesterday. So too with the Nursery Rhymes which some of the Georgian poets assiduously cultivate. But there is no foreshadowing of the characteristic Balliol product of some ten years later, the "intellectual blood" who combined hard and free living with hard work for his schools—who was at once dissipated and distinguished. The new worship of intellect—a sort of inverted snobbery—had already been satirized by Du Maurier in his sketch of the new parvenu, foreshadowing the "coming aristocracy of mind":—
He: "Charming youth, that young Bellamy—such a refined and cultivated intellect! When you think what he's risen from, poor fellow, it really does him credit!"
She: "Why, were his people—a—inferiah?"
He: "Well, yes. His Grandfather's an Earl, you know, and his Uncle's a Bishop; and he himself is Heir to an old Baronetcy with eighty thousand a year!"
Manners were in a state of transition and flux. As late as 1883 smoking in the presence of ladies was still taboo and severely restricted even at clubs, and Punch contrasts the "bereavement" of gentlemen by the disappearance of ladies after dessert with the "consolation" afforded by the cigarette. It was not until 1884 that smoking was allowed for the first time after dinners at the Mansion House, an innovation deplored in the wail of an "Old Fogey." Punch had no love of the old proprieties where they were insincere, as, for example, when in 1881 he represented Mrs. Jones declining the offer of a "hortherized copy" of the book of words of the Dam o' Cameleers from a hawker: "Oh no, thank you. We've come to see the acting, we do not wish to understand the play." But he resented the curt colloquialisms, an outcome of the general speeding-up of life, which in his view impaired the courtesies of social intercourse between the sexes; while on the other hand modish artificialities, whether new or old, always excited his ire. Twice over in 1884 he was moved to protest against the excessive use of cosmetics, in the verses to a "Painted Lady" (prompted by Malcolm Morris's address at the Health Exhibition), in which the writer looks forward to the time when it will be fashionable to be healthy, and a few months later, in "A Few Home Truths," we read:—
High-handed Greetings
Our matrons and our girls "make up" with powder, bismuth, dye—
Figures as well as frocks, obliging milliners supply—
Alas! the fairest cheeks are stained with artificial hue: